


Retrograde

by glycerineclown



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: American Politics, Amnesia, Canon-Typical Violence, Dogs, Dreams and Nightmares, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, Hate Crimes, Love, Oral Sex, Rough Sex, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-05-10 02:24:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14728191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glycerineclown/pseuds/glycerineclown
Summary: Basically, the Punisher goes off to kill Neo-Nazis and comes back with amnesia. But it's more complicated than that.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic came about as a combination of my need for the amnesia trope and my need for Frank to be more proactively anti-fascist. As a result, we have some probably unrealistic medical details (Do I care? No), and descriptions of the beliefs and actions of a fictional group of Neo-Nazis (they will die), as well as very thinly-veiled references to the current Administration (because HYDRA would definitely have voted that piece of shit into power). Any violence will happen off-screen or in reference only.
> 
> This is also a future fic, so, **AN IMPORTANT NOTE ON THE TIMELINE.**
> 
> April 2015: massacre at the carousel  
> Fall-Winter 2015: Daredevil S2  
> November 2016: The Punisher S1  
> January 2017: The Inauguration of the Actual Worst Person Who I Refuse to Name  
> September 2017: Retrograde
> 
> Endless thank yous to **aimmyarrowshigh** and **sselinaaaa** for their encouragement and ideas.

 

It’s midway through September, and New York’s summer stink is finally settling down. The Bulletin’s been getting by with window units and some twenty-year-old fans for just as long. Karen’s still sweating through her blouse.

She checks her phone for the fifth time in twenty minutes. Since getting to the office, she’s sent and received about ten emails, and taken two phone calls, but none of them were from Frank.

The after-lunch staff meeting isn’t accomplishing much. Her phone buzzes while it’s the arts section’s turn to talk, so she glances down at the screen.

_Dinah Madani._

It’s been four days since she last saw Frank—he’s been upstate, fucking up some white supremacists—and almost forty-eight hours since she last heard from him. She didn’t actually start worrying until this morning, though. Karen stands without a word, and goes out into the hall.

“We’ve got a big problem,” Dinah says. “Please come, as soon as you can.” She rattles off an address, and Karen jots it down in her notebook.

It takes her two trains and thirty minutes to get there, and she barely gets a full breath in the entire time.

Dinah opens the door, and ushers her inside.

“Where is he,” Karen says, looking around the front room. It’s a very luxurious apartment—wide windows looking out at the Upper West Side, and great air conditioning, but no Frank in sight, not from where she’s standing. She’s not used to apartments that she can’t see all of at once.

“Hang on, we’ve sedated him, but I think—” Dinah sighs, shaking her head. “I know I told you to come here, but I’m not positive that you’re who he needs to see right now.”

Karen turns. “What do you mean? What the hell happened?”

“I made myself Frank’s emergency contact, so I could step in if he ever actually showed up at a hospital,” she explains, one hand over her forehead. “He wants to know why he can’t go home. He thinks they’re all waiting for him, Maria and the kids. He doesn’t know who I am.”

Karen shakes her head. “Wait, start again.”

Dinah sighs. “He has a moderate concussion, and retrograde amnesia.”

 _“What?”_ Karen says, eyebrows raised. “You’re sure? How far back?”

“He said something about painted ponies earlier, the carousel, like he was supposed to go there today, that he’d promised them,” Dinah says, wincing. “He—he has no clue, Karen.”

Karen takes a step back, feels the blood drain out of her face. “Oh, fuck.”

She doesn’t know if she has the strength to break this to Frank, if that’s what she’s been called here to do. He won’t know her, either. He won’t _want_ to know her. Won’t want to know that his family’s gone, that he’s a mass murderer still wanted by the police, that one of his most trusted friends betrayed him.

And if he takes it badly, he’ll be a hard man to control.

But they won’t be able to lie to him about his entire life in a New York brownstone.

And she can’t help but feel responsible.

“Then why am I here?” Karen asks, and then quickly backtracks. “I mean, of course I’m glad you called, I’ll do anything I can, but—if that’s all true, he won’t—” She raises a hand to cover her mouth.

Dinah reaches out, squeezes her arm. “I know, but—you still know _him_.”

“No,” Karen says, shaking her head. “No, the Frank Castle I know is a completely different one.”

A door closes in the hall, and a man steps out into the room with his sleeves rolled up. “You must be Karen.”

Dinah gestures toward him. “Karen, this is my father, Hamid.”

Karen musters up a smile, and steps forward to shake his hand. “Thank you for your help with Frank. I know it’s not the first time.”

Hamid sighs like he just came off a long shift, but he has a strong grip. “Do you want to see him?”

She nods, and he opens a door.

Frank’s tucked into the bed, unconscious, like he could be sleeping. He looks strange there—he doesn’t fit into all the opulence of the room. There’s a bandage around his head.

“I don’t think I want to know how my daughter got the hospital to release him,” Hamid says. “I don’t know of one that would have, not to the police or to the government, not like this.”

“What do you think happened?” she asks. “To him, I mean.”

Hamid shrugs. “I’m not a neurologist, but even if I were, every case is different. One too many blows to the head, on top of everything, I suppose. Doesn’t he still have a bullet in his brain?”

“Yes, he does,” Karen says, as she walks around the side of the bed.

“And you wouldn’t happen to have detailed descriptions of every significant head trauma he’s received in the last ten years, would you?”

She snorts, against her own will, as she sits at the edge of the mattress. “No.”

Frank’s arms are folded on top of the blankets. She reaches a hand out, slowly, but pulls back before she can touch him. “I need to make a call,” Karen says, and stands. “There’s someone who should be here when he wakes up again.”

 

Curt arrives within the hour, still in the sharp suit he sells insurance in, medical bag over his shoulder. Karen could throw her arms around him.

“Thank god,” she says instead, and stands aside to let him in. “He could wake up any minute.”

“How much does he know?” Curt asks, hushed. “Have you talked to him?”

Karen shakes her head. “The last thing he remembers is being at home before Maria and the kids died. I wanted you to be the first person he saw, I—I’m afraid he’ll run away.”

Curt nods, like he is too. “This might only last a few days. I’m not sure how much we should tell him.”

“All Frank has to do is Google himself,” Karen says, digging a hand into her hair. For once, she’s so happy that Frank still uses a throwaway flip-phone instead of a pocket computer. “Maybe for now, stick to the fact that he’s not in April of 2015 anymore? Say a mission went awry?”

He sighs. “Okay.”

Dinah walks into the entry from the kitchen, then.

“Curt, this is Agent Madani,” Karen says.

“Of course,” he says, nodding again, and swings his bag down so he can shake her hand. “Curtis Hoyle, ma’am. Nice to meet you, finally.”

She takes it with a hard smile. “I’m glad you’re here, but we can do this later,” Dinah says, and points toward the bedrooms. “Second door on your left.”

Karen makes to go with him, but Curt shakes his head at her, and then disappears through the door, shutting it behind him.

“Let me show you what the hospital found on him,” Dinah says. “Come on.”

Karen follows her back into the kitchen, and Dinah pulls a plastic bag from her purse, laying it out on the counter. All that’s inside is Frank’s burner, his wallet, keys to the van, and a Bowie knife.

“Beyond the knife, I don’t think he was armed when he passed out—more likely, it was a delayed reaction from a previous fight. If he was wearing armor or had guns on him, they were gone when 911 was called.”

Karen nods. “He was going to use theirs. I don’t know about the armor.”

“What?”

Karen hesitates for a second—Dinah _is_ still a Homeland agent—but then sighs. Dinah’s in deep. “It was a faction of Neo-Nazis, upstate. He was gonna make it look like a murder-suicide, use their own guns so the wrong people wouldn’t get blamed.”

“Jesus,” Dinah says softly. “Do you know what happened?”

She shakes her head. “I haven’t talked to him in a couple days. He was still staking out their meeting points when he last called.”

“Well, he got very lucky,” Dinah says. “Had Frank been conscious when they brought him in, he could have blown his entire cover, with that wallet on him—the nurses would all have been calling him Pete. And I’m in there, under In Case of Emergency,” she says, tapping the phone through the clear plastic. “I don’t get it.”

Dinah pours her a glass of water, and they sit at the table to wait.

 

After what feels to Karen like two hours, but is closer to half of one, the door opens again, and Curt sticks his head through. “Karen,” he says, and she stands, leaving her purse behind.

Frank’s sitting up in the bed when she walks in. Karen pauses at the foot of it, feeling a little like there’s tape on the floor.

Curt stands at her shoulder, and looks between them, gesturing to her. “Can you tell me who she is, Frank?”

Frank just stares at her, almost through her, like she’s not there—but also like he’s confused, and uncomfortable, and afraid, and there she is, a stranger to him in a pencil skirt. Not the woman he wants to see when he’s stateside. Not his wife.

Frank looks to Curt, and shakes his head.

Her heart sinks, and she presses her lips together. She can’t possibly tell him the truth, not yet.

A little watery, Karen steps forward, around the side of the bed. “I’m Karen, I’m a friend. Are you sure I don’t look familiar?”

“Sorry, I don’t—uh, it’s nice to meet you, ma’am,” he says, and then winces at the words.

Curt sighs. “Let’s talk outside,” he says. “Just a minute, Frank.”

Karen looks away from both of them, hand over her mouth, and leaves the room.

She hears Curt close the door before he meets her in the kitchen. He sighs, and when Karen turns to look at him, he’s scratching the back of his neck. “I think it’s probably best if I take him home with me.”

Wiping under her eyes, Karen nods. “I’ll pack a bag for him, and bring it by tomorrow morning?”

“Okay,” Curt says. “Can you call Lieberman, too, have him track down the van? We need to find it before anyone else does.”

Karen sighs, and crosses her arms. “Yeah, I will.”

“Hey,” he says, taking her by the shoulders. “It’ll be alright. We’ll just take it one day at a time.”

“But I gave him the names,” Karen says, and sniffs. “This—god, this is all my fault.”

Curt scoffs, and shakes his head. “No, it isn’t. Don’t you think I would’ve happily gone with him? He told me no. And all this—it’ll be temporary, Karen.”

She sighs through her tears, and wraps her arms around his shoulders. “I’m so glad that he has you.”

He nods, and hugs her back. “Don’t you think the feeling’s mutual? There’s no way I could handle this guy on my own.”

 

Karen goes home, takes the dog out for a short walk, and fills his bowl with kibble.

She calls David once she finally has a chance to sit down. He reacts with the same reserved, curse-laden panic that Karen expected from him. She may have found their names and whatever history she could access on her own, but David found their home addresses, and figured out day-to-day schedules for most of them.

They called themselves Röter Schlangen—they were sixteen alt-right douchebags, spread throughout the state and into Pennsylvania. Several had family in HYDRA and ties to the east coast chapters of the American Neo-Nazi Party and the KKK.

Karen had been the one to bring them to Frank’s attention. There had been two murders in Utica a few months prior, and a fire in an AME church in New Jersey not long after that. It didn’t take much digging to find a barely-sanitized mission statement. Social media pages full of vitriol and anti-Semitic violence.

She’d looked up the German, too—it translated to ‘red snake.’ Not too imaginative, if you ask her, but villains never are these days.

They were supporting far-right political radicals, and showing up at rallies in open-carry states. There were photos of their leader shaking hands with the former Grand Wizard. Memes advocating for eugenics. Court dates that had gone nowhere, and substantial rap sheets.

It was safe to assume that they were very heavily armed. And if the law wasn’t going to dole out justice, well.

Right away, it had felt more like a job for the Punisher than for the Bulletin.

Frank had been away from that kind of firefight, though. He hadn’t spilled much blood at all, not since they got together. Bashing a rapist’s head in was bloody and kind of fun for him, but it didn’t give him the same rush that war did, righteous or not. She could tell he was getting itchy for it, like it might help his life make sense.

One night while they were walking home in the dark, he quietly hailed her a cab before slitting the throat of a man who was spray-painting Swastikas outside of a Jewish community center.

It’s a fucked-up addiction to consider feeding.

Karen thought about getting a second opinion first, but the only people she could ask truthfully, the only other people close enough to Frank, were a Jewish whistleblower, a black man, and a first-generation Iranian-American.

Karen never thought she’d be supplying Frank with targets—and at this rate, she won’t ever be doing it again. She wishes _she_ could forget the last two years of American politics, though. A lot of people she knows have said and done things recently, that they never thought they could.

Karen’s still on the phone when David has a location for the vehicle. He’d convinced Frank to let him put a GPS tracker on it, and promises to pick the van up himself.

David even has a spare key.

After, the dog follows Karen around the apartment while she packs a bag for Frank—jeans and sweats, a jacket, underwear and socks, the book he was reading before he left. On a sticky note, she writes, “YOU HAVE A FAKE I.D.” and slaps it to Frank’s wallet.

She takes the framed photo of Maria with Lisa and Frank Jr. off the side table by the couch, and puts it in the bag too, between the folded clothes so the glass won’t break. His things from the bathroom were gone already, so she digs out a new toothbrush from a drawer. Karen slips a sack of his favorite rice cakes into the bag as well, and zips it up.

She considers the guitar leaning in the corner, but decides she doesn’t want to carry it onto the train.

The punching bag against the opposite wall is completely still.

She brings the duffel to Curt’s place in the morning before heading to work, and texts Curt when she’s outside the building instead of ringing the bell. He comes down to the front door, and lets her into the small lobby.

“Any progress?” Karen asks.

“I don’t know,” Curt says, and he sighs, shaking his head. “He didn’t sleep well. I heard him get up a few times.”

Karen nods, and hands Curt the bag. “There’s a picture of Maria and the kids in there.”

“He still doesn’t know.”

She cocks her head to the side, and tries to smile. “Let’s give it another day, if we can.”

“Yeah.”

 

They don’t get another day. Curt texts her a while later—Frank had awoken from the same vicious nightmare he’s had so many times before, but for the first time.

He’s not able to lie to Frank’s face, especially not after what Bill had done.

Curt goes with him to the cemetery. Karen takes a long lunch, and meets them after, on a suburban street she hasn’t been to in almost two years, and never in the light of day.

The lot is empty. All the debris is gone, and the grass has grown back. No one’s bothered to build anything on top of the empty foundation, even though the land must be worth a lot of money for a quiet area in Queens.

Frank and Curtis step out of a cab a few minutes after Karen arrives.

Frank’s face is all red as they join her on the sidewalk. The bandage is gone, and his hood’s up. Karen reaches into her bag, and pulls out a tissue. He takes it with a short nod, and blows his nose.

Curt isn’t dry-eyed either, but he shakes his head when she offers him one.

Karen looks away, down at the grey foundation. It’s darkened from the recent rain, and growing moss in places. “You never came back here, after, as far as I know. Except to blow it up.”

Frank’s frowning when she meets his eyes again. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but how do we know each other?” Frank asks. “I mean, Curt said we were friends, but—”

Fear twists in her stomach. He doesn’t know enough yet to understand how and why they’re together, but if she just starts at the beginning, she won't be lying.

“Did Curtis tell you about the gangs, and the cover-up?”

Frank and Curt both nod.

“I was on your legal team after you got arrested. The DA was gonna stuff you in a body bag and be done with it, they were lying through their teeth about what happened,” Karen says. “I broke into your house to look around before we ever really met.”

Frank’s brow furrows. “You a lawyer?”                                                                          

“No, I was the secretary for a firm—Nelson and Murdock? One of our clients had been a hitman for the Irish, and I was with him when you came to kill him.”

He still looks confused. “And then you just decided to defend me as well.”

Karen shrugs. “We thought we could save you from the death penalty, and your public defender certainly wasn’t going to try. But you weren’t really interested in living, I don’t think.”

The side of Frank’s mouth perks up, too, just a little.

“You went to prison, broke out right away, and after the firm folded, I went to work for the New York Bulletin,” Karen continues. “We published an exposé about the sting in the park.”

He makes his impressed face, and it’s so familiar that Karen smiles.

But then her face falls, because she’s still so unsure. Karen sighs, and reaches out. Frank’s eyes follow her hand into the air between them, but she’s not close enough. She curls her fingers into a fist as she brings it back to her side.

“I’m so sorry, Frank. I know that can’t mean a lot to you, and that it must be hard for you to know who to trust right now, but I want you to know, I mean, if Curtis didn’t already hammer this home—absolutely everyone involved is dead, Frank. Every single one. Except Russo, who’s in a facility upstate with a fucked-up face. He will suffer there for the rest of his life—you chose that for him. You did absolutely everything you could to avenge them.”

“It’s the truth, man,” Curtis says, nodding.

Frank looks up at him. “That supposed to make me feel better? What am I, now?”

Karen winces, and steps closer, wants to take him by the shoulders, but Frank’s eyes are blanker than she’d like as he looks at her. “You protect the people you care about, Frank. You’re not mindless, you are a man. And I would not be alive without you.”

“Me neither, brother,” Curt says. “We’re living proof. And we’re not the only ones.”

 

David meets her in an alley in Brooklyn with the van that night. As they stand in front of the open doors to the trunk, Karen breathes a sigh of relief, her hands on her hips.

The condensed version of his arsenal’s all there: two long-range sniper rifles and four handguns, three silencers, a case full of knives, and his body armor. A lot of ammo, even though the guns were a last resort to begin with. Frank’s backpack is there too, with his personals still in it.

There’s a file on the passenger seat, with Karen’s list, and David’s intel. Eleven of the names and faces are crossed out. There’s only one really big bad left, and four smaller fish.

His attack on the meeting in Syracuse must have gone as planned.

“It all looks okay to me,” David says. “I know where Frank keeps the van when he’s home—I could take it there for you, and hide the guns.”

Karen takes Frank’s favorite pistol out of the gun bag before she zips it up. “Thanks a lot, David. That would be perfect.”

He shrugs. “Of course.” David scratches the back of his neck. “You think he’ll remember me?”

“I don’t know,” Karen says, as she unloads the pistol and clears the chamber. “It’s worth a shot.” She looks down the alley, before sliding the gun into Frank’s backpack, and zipping it up.

“Does he know about you guys?”

Karen shakes her head. “Not yet.” She tugs the bag out and slings it over one shoulder. “I’ve been trying to give him time.”

“That man—god, Karen, Frank loves you,” David says, as he shuts the back of the van. “It’s been clear in his face ever since I met him. It’ll come back. He will.”

She closes her eyes, and sighs. “I hope you’re right.”

 

She keeps an eye on the police blotters, social media, and local newsfeeds—deaths of white supremacists tend to get a lot of attention. It goes from silence to pandemonium within a day, after the names of the dead are reported.  

David sends her a thumbs-up emoji in the morning, with a link to an article she’s already read three times. In the tone, between the lines, the writer is calling them what they are: fascist hate-mongers.

And the police are treating it as a murder-suicide, just as planned.

Karen hears from Curtis the next day, that he and Frank went to group, but he doesn’t offer much in the way of details. Madani calls, too, hoping for an update, but Karen’s just as starved for information about his condition as she is.

“This might be the best thing for him, Karen,” Dinah says, tentative. “If it’s permanent. I know that’s a shitty thing for me to say to you—”

“No,” Karen says, and sighs. “No, I know exactly what you mean. There’s a lot he doesn’t want to remember.”

There’s silence on the other end of the phone for a few beats, and then Dinah says, “If he had to choose, though. He’d remember it, for you.”

Karen smiles, and closes her eyes against the burn of tears. “Thanks.”

 

On Friday night, Karen brings David and Sarah around to Curt’s apartment. David’s carrying takeout, and Karen’s nervous—she’s been wringing her hands the whole way.

Curt lets them in, smiling wide at the bag of food, and they walk through to the kitchen. Frank turns from where he’s standing at the sink.

“Hi, Frank,” Karen says, with a soft smile, and he nods to her.

“Ma’am.”

She chooses not to linger too much on the title—they had known each other a long time before Frank ever used her name.

“I’ve brought some friends,” Karen says, and turns to David, who has set down the food, and Sarah, who’s taking her coat off and adjusting her hair.

David steps forward first, and looks to Karen before meeting Frank’s eyes. “Uh, I’m David. David Lieberman. Or, Micro, sometimes. I’m a hacker.” Sarah joins him, then, and David turns to her, sliding an arm around her waist. “This is my wife, Sarah.”

Frank shakes both of their hands.

“Our family is back together because of what you’ve done,” Sarah says. “I’ve said it many times, but thank you.”

Frank looks at them like he doesn’t know what to say. He’s saved by Curtis, going through the bag of takeout, and Karen opens a few drawers to find the silverware. Sarah busies herself pouring glasses of water, and glasses of wine, too.

They plate the food, and Frank seems to relax a little once they start eating, crowded around a table that’s a bit too small for five people.

“I could tell stories I guess, maybe that’s how this works,” David starts, and then he doesn’t stop. Karen’s never heard it from start to finish, how David came to be in the basement, how he found Frank, and the work they did together.

He tells the part about Gunner more softly. Curtis chimes in about the arrow through Frank’s shoulder, and how David nearly threw up all over the basement.

Sarah picks up the story after that, describing the strange man she ran into with her car. How he kept showing up, fixing things around the house and unnerving her a little. Bonding with their children.

When Karen looks over at Frank, his elbows are on the table, his fingers folded together against his chin, half of his food still on the plate.

He’s completely silent.

 

After the Liebermans have cleared out and the dishes have been put away, Karen finds Frank slumped on Curt’s couch. His arms are limp, one foot up on the coffee table.

He looks up when Karen sinks down next to him, holding the remains of her second beer of the night.

“I’m sorry if this was too much, tonight,” she says. “They wanted to see you.”

Frank frowns, and sits up straighter, lifts a hand up to the scruff on his cheek. “Isn’t it dangerous for you to have anything to do with me? Any of you? I’m a fugitive.”

Karen shrugs. “Yeah, but I’ve been trying to teach you for a long time that being alone sucks.”

She brings the bottle back to her lips, and as she swallows, Frank turns toward her, elbow over the back of the couch.

He opens his mouth to speak, but then he closes it again.

“What is it?” Karen asks, and leans forward to set her bottle on the table.

“I want you to tell me the truth about something.”

Karen nods. “Shoot.”

“I don’t think we’re just friends.”

She lets out a breath, and steels herself. “You don’t?”

Frank shakes his head at her. “There was a long blonde hair in the duffel bag that magically appeared for me. And the way you, uh, the way you look at me. And Curt’s a shitty liar.”

Karen presses her lips together, averting her eyes, but he keeps going.

“I think you’re bullshittin’ me because my wife’s dead, tryin’ to give me and Maria some kinda grace period. You’re waitin’ to see if I remember you on my own.”

“You’re right,” Karen says softly, and turns back to him. “On all counts. You had a long time, before, to process everything, to grieve, before we ever discussed it. I didn’t want to rob you of that.”

“When did we—discuss it?”

“Christmas of last year, so, about ten months ago, now. We have an apartment together. And we have a dog who misses you very much,” she says. “It might help you to see the place, if you want. Might jog something.”

“Not tonight.”

She shakes her head. “No, of course not.”

Frank sighs, digging a hand into his hair. “Maybe, uh, maybe tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“We have a dog?”

Karen grins, and pulls out her phone. “His name’s Oscar. He loves you.”

 

She opens the door the next day with her phone pressed to her ear. Oscar slips past her, into the hall, and immediately jumps on Frank, making happy yips and wriggling incessantly.

“Okay, alright, hi pup,” Frank says, looking down at the dog and rubbing his flank. “Go inside, go on.”

Karen stands aside to let them in, closes the door, and sighs into the phone. “Ellison, he can’t sue us for printing what he _literally said_. It was on the record! I don’t—I _know_ that,” she says. “But it was completely relevant! I don’t know why we’re arguing about this. I know you agree with me.”

Frank looks up at her, crouching now on the floor with the dog, whose tail is thumping against the table leg. She rolls her eyes in apology, and he smiles back.

“You’ve got to be kidding, Ellison—of course I listened to it back, like six times, that’s how I transcribed it in the first place. I’ll give you the tape.”

He stands up to take off his jacket, and hangs it over the back of a chair, before wandering over to the bookshelves, the dog still at his heels, clearly not done getting Frank’s attention.

“Look, there’s really nothing I can do about it now, so can we have another useless conversation about this on Monday? Thank you. Uh-huh.” Karen huffs. “Yeah, you too,” she says, and looks up at Frank as she ends the call. “Sorry about that.” 

Frank shakes his head. “It’s okay.”

She digs a hand into her hair as she walks around the couch to join him by the bookshelves. Frank’s looking at the photo of St. Patrick’s Day with Foggy and Matt—it’s not framed, just propped up against the books.

Karen hums. “That’s your legal team, completely wasted and too idealistic for their own good.”

She turns to a different shelf, and picks up another photo. “Sarah took this one,” she says, and hands it to him.

They’re standing in the Liebermans’ living room—through a full beard, Frank’s scowling at the camera, and Karen’s smiling at him. They’re both holding glasses of rosé.

Frank runs his thumb over the edge of the photo. “We look happy.”

She smiles. “It was David’s birthday.” Karen turns then, and looks toward the couch, where Frank’s backpack is waiting. “I have something for you,” she says, and motions for him to sit down.

Frank returns the picture to the shelf, and he goes, hands rubbing on his thighs.

Karen perches herself on the coffee table in front of him. “David rescued the battle van and your arsenal for you, and this,” she says, touching the strap of Frank’s pack.

He pulls the bag into his lap, and unzips it.

On top, she’d put the plastic bag from the hospital. He lifts it out and places it on the couch next to him. Frank’s thermos and clothes take up most of the room in the largest section of the bag. Karen watches him open the smaller pockets, and he pulls out the gun and clip, a first aid kit, toiletries, granola bars, a pair of binoculars, black face paint, a phone charger. He looks at all of it carefully, takes the clothing out of the bag and holds each piece up individually.

It’s unclear whether he remembers any of them.

Frank makes a face down at the bag. “So, I leave once in a while and you just… let me?”

She cringes back. “Actually, I gave you your last assignment.”

“What?”

“I’d never done it before. This was a special case,” she says. “I don’t like it, but it’s…” Karen sighs, and meets his eyes. “It’s who you are, Frank. It’s hard for me to admit, but there’s a lot of bad people in this world, and sometimes your way is the answer.”

He’s still frowning. “Last thing I told Maria—I was gonna stay home with her. I wasn’t gonna go back for another tour.”

Karen nods.

“I meant it,” he says. “I needed to stop.”

He’s judging himself—she doesn’t know why she expected any different. Karen just looks at him for a moment, and then she says, “You know how you got that scar, above your ear?”

Frank brings a hand up to it. “Curt said Billy shot me.”            

“He did, but—you were trying to get to me. I’d gone after a gun rights advocate in the Bulletin for bombing a building, and you had to watch him pull me into an elevator on the eighteenth floor, with a dead man’s switch. You couldn’t follow us inside.”

Frank sits back, his brows knit deep, like he’s trying to remember it.

“You took the stairs, and when I saw you again in the basement, you’d been shot in the head, you had a bad limp, one arm didn’t work, blood all over—you’d fought past I don’t know _how_ many cops and—and you still got to me. And that’s _before_ the bomb went off.”

Scrubbing a hand over his face, Frank huffs. “Jesus. All these stories.”

Karen bites back a smile, but it comes through anyway. “I don’t know how you’re still alive either.”

She leans over, and picks up the plastic bag with Frank’s phone, knife, and keys, and opens it.

“These are keys to this apartment. You’re welcome to it, if you want.” Turning the jingling metal over in her hands, Karen indicates each one—the keys to the building, the mailbox, battle van, his empty hovel of an apartment, a lockbox—and he nods.

“Curt said that I never spent much time at his place, that it wouldn’t help me remember.” After a moment, Frank looks up at her. “I’m not ready for, y’know, you and me—”

Karen shakes her head. “Of course. You don’t have to be.”

“But you want me here?”

“Yes, I always want you here,” Karen says, just as Oscar headbutts her knees, and she smiles down at the dog. “Besides, I’d feel better knowing someone’s with him during the day,” she says, flapping Oscar’s ear with her fingers. “He’s ruined a few pairs of your socks since you left.”

Frank nods. “I do feel like I’m cramping Curt’s style.”

“How’s his couch?” Karen asks.

“I’ll put it to ya this way,” Frank says. “I slept on the floor last night.”

Karen shows Frank the bedroom a while later, watches him run his fingers over the bedspread, and poke into the drawers. When she opens the closet, the stark difference in their palettes is in full effect, Karen’s soft summer colors against his standard blacks and greys.

She writes him up a cheat sheet, with their address, her phone number, the name and number of Oscar’s vet, and the passwords to his laptop and the internet.

Frank takes the couch that night, and she doesn’t fight him on it.

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

Karen wakes up the next morning in an empty bed. It’s only after sitting up and blearily checking her email that she remembers that Frank’s home, that he’s in the living room. When she opens the door and walks out in her pajamas, though, Frank is gone, and so is the dog—and when she looks to the hook by the door, so is the leash.

There’s a reason they don’t let Oscar sleep in their bedroom.

By the time coffee is brewed, she’s dressed, and they’re coming in the door.

Karen fills Oscar’s bowl with kibble, and then fills a cup with coffee for Frank, black like hers. He smiles and thanks her as he accepts it.

It could almost be any other morning.

Frank blows on his coffee, takes a tentative first sip, and then looks down at it. “That’s good shit.”

Karen smirks at him. “Better be, you bought it.”

They sit down at the counter and drink in relative silence. It’s not uncomfortable, but he’s been in the apartment almost a full day, and they still haven’t talked about what’s really going on with him.

“I haven’t been wanting to pester you too much about what you remember,” Karen says. “But are the past couple years a complete blank, or—”

Frank nods.

“Nothing?”

“People keep telling me all these things, but.” Frank sighs, and swirls his coffee around in the mug. “I don’t know. I can’t make it fit together.”

“Maybe we need to pull out a calendar,” Karen says, and gets up, heading for a small filing cabinet that she keeps by the desk. “Lucky for you, I hardly ever throw anything out.”

The first thing Karen brings him is a folder full of newspaper clippings, and after some searching, she also produces a 2016 calendar. She takes the one for 2017 off the wall, too—its theme is pit bull puppies, and Frank smiles at the cover before opening it up.

She can’t find one for 2015, though, and upon deciding that chronological is the only way to go, Karen prints one out from the internet. They shut Oscar in the bedroom, and spread the months out on the floor, eventually cutting up the 2016 calendar to join it.

Karen starts with the specific dates she’d looked at so many times during the trial, plotting Frank’s attacks on the gangs, his court appearances, his jail time. The events from the newspaper clippings come next, and after that, it’s her memory or just plain guesswork. Frank has questions about most of everything she thinks to add, but she doesn’t know every answer. There’s a ton she was never there for, only heard about, in varying levels of detail, from his mouth or someone else’s.

Many of these events she hasn’t ever spoken of with anyone but Frank—the night at the diner, the night he shot Schoonover, the night they met at the docks. She can’t imagine how it sounds to him. She’s thought about these nights so many times, re-ran them over and over in her head, but her speech isn’t rehearsed, it’s too emotional to be as informative as it should be.

They pause halfway through to make eggs and toast, but nearly three hours and a few dozen sticky notes later, Karen’s assembled a fairly detailed outline that stretches from the death of his family, up until the fight with Bill, and Thanksgiving dinner at David’s, which Frank did not attend.

All that’s left now is their life together, but it feels like a good stopping point. Frank looks exhausted, still on the floor, leaning against the back of the couch.

“Thank you,” he says, as Karen begins stacking the pages in order. “Curt didn’t know a lot of this.”

“You intentionally kept him in the dark, I think.”

Karen has woken up to Frank having a nightmare enough times that she can tell it’s happening without even seeing him. Oscar can too. He whines at her from the side of the bed, and when she listens closely, she can hear Frank mumbling in his sleep.

Karen sighs at the dog, and pats him on the head.

The Monday morning sun is still below the horizon when she opens the bedroom door just enough to slip through, leaving Oscar behind.

Karen crosses the apartment, kneels in front of the couch, and cards her fingers gently into Frank’s hair, careful around his stitches, the way she’s been wanting to do for days. It’s still battle-shorn.

“Frank,” she says softly. “You’re dreaming. Come back to me.”

He opens his eyes with a jolt, and then shudders out a breath when he registers her. “Oh. Hey.”

She smiles, and keeps stroking his scalp until his breathing evens out to match hers.

Frank clears his throat. “Shit. Did I wake you?”

“Oscar did,” Karen says. “Sit up a little.”

After a moment, he does, enough for her to move Frank’s pillow and sit down at the end of the couch. Slowly, he lowers his head into Karen’s lap, still on his side, not looking at her.

Her fingers resume touching his scalp, and Frank’s body seems to relax a little more, but from his profile, he’s still troubled.

“Have I ever hurt you?” he asks.

She frowns down at him. “What?”

“I don’t know myself anymore. I don’t know what I’m capable of.”

Karen breathes out. “You’ve never hit me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He doesn’t respond.

It’s a little early in the morning for this kind of discussion, but Karen decides to answer as honestly as she can—he’s not asking her to sugar-coat it. She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again, Frank’s looking up at her.

“It’s not like knowing and loving you has ever been an easy thing to do, Frank,” she says. “It’s always hurt. You do dangerous, scary things, and I wish you wouldn’t. I’m always caught between being terrified for you and having faith that you’ll figure it out.”

Frank turns onto his back. “But why would you?”

It’s a hell of a question, and one she’s asked herself, and others have asked her, many, many times, whether they knew the role he’s played in her life or not.

In the end, Karen supposes, it comes down to who she can be when she’s with him.

“I guess—because no one has ever known me as well as you do. I never have to hide who I am from you. And you never judge me.” Karen traces her finger around a scar on his chest, and cocks her head to the side. “You gave me a speech once, about how it’s the people who get close, who you let in, that can hurt you. And I let you in right away. But you let me in, too.”

Frank’s gaze moves past her, up at the ceiling, before meeting her eyes again. “How’ve you hurt me?”

It’s her turn to look away. It’s not the same, and she knows it. “I put myself in harm’s way too much, push buttons I know I shouldn’t. Ask for more than you can give me.”

“Sounds like you’re gettin’ the short end of that stick,” he says, scrunching his nose up.

Karen shrugs a shoulder. “The sex is good, too.”

Frank breaks into a laugh at that. “Uh-huh.” He sits up then, slow, and swings his legs down, pushing the blanket off his lap. Frank rubs a hand over his face before looking across at her again. “You gave me a home, Karen. At great risk to yourself.”

“Why are you making this into a competition?”

“I just want to make sure that this is the right thing,” Frank says. “That I deserve it.”

“Let me tell you something, Frank,” she says, and leans in. “The worst thing you could do to me is leave because you think I’ll be safer that way. I’m almost more afraid of that than of you dying. That one day you’ll just up and decide I’m better off without you. We’re a team. We keep each other afloat. You got that?”

He blinks at her, and nods. “Yes, ma’am.”

 

The threat of being sued by that source doesn’t amount to anything—there’s no case and the Bulletin has a good lawyer on hand.

She suspects that Ellison may have just called so he could say that he did.

Karen interviews two single mothers that day, about their struggles to find affordable apartments that will also accept young kids. Based on what they tell her and Karen’s own research, “no children” rules are a common occurrence in New York, and also an illegal one. The landlords that Karen reaches out to decline to comment.

The women thank her for covering it in the newspaper. Neither of them can afford to fight, but she knows a lawyer with a soft heart. Karen holds onto their contact info, and makes a mental note to call Foggy, even though he probably has more than enough on his plate.

When she gets home that night, Frank’s making dinner. It looks and smells like stroganoff—he’s made her this recipe many times before.

She puts her keys and bag down, and takes off her coat.

“Just like mama used to make, huh?” Karen says, as she walks into the kitchen.

“Yeah, I guess.”

There’s a new sticky note on the counter. It reads, in Frank’s chicken scratch, _Did someone put a drill through my foot?_

“You remembered this?” she asks, peeling it from the countertop.

He turns away from the stove to look at her. “Oh, I don’t know—it was in my dream last night. I looked at my foot, and the top of it’s all fucked up.”

Karen sighs, and nods. “It was the Irish.” She walks around the island to stand beside him. “You told me they were threatening a dog—we actually went around to some of the local shelters, to try and find her, but we came home with Oscar instead.”

He adjusts a knob on the stove. “I killed ‘em.”

“Yeah, you did, Frank.”

“I had some help, though. Some… _I don’t know what_.”

She smiles. “Did he have horns?”

Frank furrows his brow, and nods at her. “Thought maybe it was the dream talkin’.”

“Nope,” Karen says, shaking her head. “All in one package, that was a masked vigilante called Daredevil, your lawyer Matt Murdock, and my ex-boyfriend.”

Frank snorts, and picks a wooden spoon up off the counter to stir the stroganoff. “You got a thing for fighters, ma’am?”

She crosses her arms, and leans against the counter. She could tell him that Matt’s dead, that she didn’t know he was a fighter, but he doesn’t need to hear that.

Karen sighs instead. “Just the cute ones.”

 

The next morning, three hours before she would usually wake up, Karen gets out of bed, and kneels by the couch again. Frank’s shaking, damp with sweat.

“Frank, you’re dreaming,” she says. “Come back to me.”

This time when he wakes, Frank sits bolt upright, gasping, and then looks to her, and after a moment, he sinks back down onto the cushions.

“What happened?”

Frank groans, and covers his face. “I don’t think—it couldn’t have happened,” he says, shaking his head. “The Liebermans, they were in my house, with my kids, with Maria.”

Karen nods. She doesn’t need to hear the rest, but she also can’t tell him that everything’s fine, that it was all a dream. She sighs instead. “Come to bed, Frank. There’s plenty of room, and I’ll keep my hands to myself.”

He looks down at himself, and then back to her. “What?”

“It’s four in the morning. Come to bed.”

He sighs through his nose. “Gimme a sec.”

With a nod, Karen stands, and retreats to the bedroom, before turning on a lamp—she won’t fall back to sleep at this rate. She hears the water run in the kitchen as she’s pulling back the covers.

Frank comes in after a minute, holding his pillow. He heads for the side she’s not occupying, and lays down on top of the blankets, bunches his pillow up behind his head.

Oscar’s between them in an instant, curling up against Frank’s side.

Karen turns to face him. “Tell me the story about you and Lisa, and the time she brought you to show and tell.”

He looks over at her. “I told you about that?”

Karen nods.

Frank clears his throat, and sighs.

 

Work is hectic the next day—she has to transcribe a few new interviews and figure out how to fit them all into three hundred words, has to get four people to call her back, has to reframe that article on housing discrimination to be about three people instead of two.

Ellison’s double-fisting coffee, and has very mixed feelings about Buzzfeed’s news division.

Karen goes home, changes out of her work clothes, and thirty minutes before the end of Curt’s group session, she takes Oscar for a walk to the church. It’ll be getting too dark for this pretty soon—another few weeks and they’ll be taking cabs to meet up with Frank. Oscar isn’t so menacing that men don’t catcall her on the street, and she can’t take the subway with him on a leash.

Frank comes out the side door of the church after a few minutes, Curtis lagging behind him, talking to another vet. Frank smiles when he sees them, and Oscar pulls on the leash, tail wagging.

“Hey,” he says. “You been waiting long?”

“Just a couple minutes,” Karen says, and nods toward the building. “Curt will be too proud to remind you, but you’ve been paying for the space and coffee here.”

“I have, huh?”

She nods. “Bill had been covering it.”

He makes a face. “Guess that’s only fair.”

The man Curt had been talking to waves and heads off across the parking lot, and Curt comes up to join them.

“Hey Curt, listen to this,” Frank says. “Karen thinks you’d be too proud to remind me that I pay the rent here.”

Curt presses a hand over his heart, and laughs. “Oh, rest assured, I told him,” he says. “But I appreciate the sentiment, Karen. Good lookin’ out.”

She rolls her eyes, and they walk with Curtis toward his train, Frank taking up Oscar’s leash. It had been a good session, from the way they talk about it, though they don’t go into specifics.

Karen and Frank start toward home after they say their goodbyes. She points out some of the restaurants as they walk by, places she and Frank have gone to for dinner, or that she’s been to on her own. He tells her a story she’s heard before, about a pawn shop that they pass by, run by the Italian mafia—he’d found a guitar there when he was fifteen.

They walk through a college campus, too, and as they’re passing the library, a girl with big curls looks up from her phone and stops dead.

“Oh, shit,” she says. “Frank?”

Karen’s never met this girl, but she clearly knows Frank, and she’s looking at him not with fear, but almost with relief.

“Don’t you remember me?” the girl says. “It’s Hayley.”

Frank blinks, looks to Karen for help.

The name, though, a tiny detail, turns a light on in her brain. “Hayley and Carl,” Karen says.

Hayley nods at her. “Yeah.”

Looking around them, Karen slides her hand into the crook of Frank’s elbow. “Frank, that night with Bill, at the carousel—she was there.”

His eyes go wide, and then dart to the girl, who is looking back at them, confused.

Karen smiles, and introduces herself. “Let’s find somewhere to talk.”

Hayley leads them around the block, and they sit down at a wobbly table outside a bodega. She takes off a backpack, and rests her arms on the tabletop. It’s not the right weather for her long sleeves.

Oscar lays down on the cement by their feet, panting.

“So, Frank’s had some memory loss,” Karen begins.

Frank scoffs at her. “Some?”

“He doesn’t remember anything after April of 2015.”

Hayley’s eyebrows shoot up. “Whoa. That’s bananas.” She digs a hand into her hair. “Should I—I mean, do you want me to tell you what happened?”

Both of them turn to Frank for an answer, and he just nods.

Hayley sighs, and looks down at her hands. “Well, I had a part-time job at the Central Park Carousel last year. And we were closing up one night, me and Carl. And this guy walked in, with a bag over his shoulder, and asked for our help. Said he couldn’t believe his luck, that we’d be the perfect bait for a friend of his.”

Frank scrubs a hand over his eyes and cheek. “Oh, my god.”

“He slit our wrists, tied us up to a couple of the horses, and turned on the carousel.”

She tugs up her sleeves, then, to show him. The vertical lines are still prominent, months later—they look like they were deep.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he says, softly.

Hayley nods. “Blood just kept coming down our arms, and you showed up—he wanted us to beg for you to help us, so we did. And you were shooting at each other, for _so long_ , and then that lady, that agent showed up, and she got shot.”

“Madani,” Karen supplies, and Frank nods.

“And when it was over, you untied us, and we all just sat at the edge of the platform and waited for help.”

“That shouldn’t have happened,” Frank says again, shaking his head. “I’m so sorry.”

Hayley shakes hers right back. “Don’t be,” she says. “You saved us, and you didn’t run. When I saw your face, I knew who you were. That you had saved us in the same place where your family was murdered. That he did that to you.”

Frank bites his lip, his gaze focused down at the tabletop. Oscar’s getting restless, sniffing around.

“How’s Carl?” Karen asks.

Hayley brightens at the question. “He’s good. He got into CUNY. I haven’t seen him in a while, though. It was hard, after.”

She pulls out her phone and scrolls through it, bringing up a picture of herself and Carl in hospital beds. She hands it across the table to Karen, and looks back to Frank.

“We never saw you again after that. We hoped they weren’t gonna lock you up.”

Karen looks down at the screen. The boy, Carl, has long blond hair like Foggy’s. They’re so young, and tired, and relieved. Karen tilts it to show Frank, who nods, and then she hands it back.

“What about you?” Frank asks. “You going to school?”

She smiles and nods. “I just started community college, but I want to go to Pratt, after I get my AA.”

“That’s good,” he says. “Good for you.”

“Thanks.” Hayley looks down as Oscar goes around to her side of the table, and she makes kissy noises, holding her hand out. “Is this your dog?”

Frank nods. “That’s Oscar.”

“What a sweetheart,” she says, petting him.  

“He is.”

 

When they get home after grabbing dinner, it’s almost dark.

Karen takes a shower, changes into her pajamas, and sits down with her laptop at the kitchen table. She goes over her questions for the three interviews she has the next afternoon, one over the phone and two at a coffee shop in the West Village, and cleans up a draft she wrote the day before.

She’s fully engrossed when she hears the scratch of Frank’s fingers on the guitar in the corner.

“This is mine, right?” Frank says, holding it up. “Will I disturb you if I play around with it?”

She smiles at him, and shakes her head. “No, go ahead.”

Frank sits down on the couch with the guitar, and she watches the back of his head as he tunes it by ear. The twang of his playing is no different than what she remembers—most of the songs he knows are the same ones he’s been playing since before he joined the Marines.

Resting her head on her fist, Karen just listens to him for a few minutes, before going back to her draft.

After a while, Frank gets up and heads into the bathroom. He brushes his teeth, and while he’s in the shower, Karen closes her laptop, and goes into the bedroom.

His pillow is still there, on his side of the mattress. She gets into bed, cracks open a book, and waits for him to choose.

Frank comes in with a towel around his waist and his hair damp. He grabs a t-shirt and boxers from their closet, and she keeps her eyes down on her book while he puts them on.

Modest sleepwear for Frank, but of course she’ll take it.

When she looks up, he’s looking down at his hands, unsure. He steps forward, and sits down at the edge of the bed, and turns, meets her eyes. “I don’t, uh—I don’t really know what it would mean if I shared the bed with you.”

Karen shrugs. “I don’t either, Frank. But maybe we’ll both manage to get a good night’s sleep.”

He nods, and after a few seconds, Frank gets up, pulls back the covers, and slides beneath them.

If he knew her, if he loved her, she would bury herself against him, wrap herself around him, kiss him until they were fucking or promising to.

Karen sets her book aside, and turns off the lamp.

In the middle of the night, Karen’s eyes burst open—the digital clock on the dresser reads 2:04. She hears Frank grunt, there in bed, behind her.

When he speaks, it’s almost a whisper. “One shot, one kill. You taught me that.”

She leans over to the bedside table, and turns on the lamp. Karen rolls back to face him, and reaches out.

“Frank,” she says, touching his shoulder. “Frank. You’re all right.”

His arm jerks under her hand as his eyes open, and he breathes out hard, and closes them again. “Karen,” he pants out.

She nods. “Yeah, it’s me. I’m right here.”

“Shit.” He brings a hand up to cover his eyes. “You were bleeding. You said I was dead to you.”

“I’ve got the scars to prove it, just like you,” she says, softly. “But I didn’t mean it.”

He sighs. “Felt like you did.”

Karen chuckles into her pillow. She’d been mad as hell, but she’d be lying if she said it was anything other than an empty threat. “The next time I saw you, most of a year later, I took you home with me and offered you a drink.” 

Frank raises an eyebrow at her.

“You’d brought me white roses. I managed to keep them alive for four whole months.”

He smiles then, a full-on grin, and it makes her heartbeat stagger forward. If she keeps looking at him, she doesn’t know what she’ll do.

Karen sighs. “I’m gonna turn that lamp back off now, and we’re gonna sleep, alright?”

He nods, and turns onto his back. “Okay.”

 

Karen’s alarm wakes them both up at seven on Thursday morning.

When she gets back from the bathroom, he’s wearing jeans and brewing coffee—he was always an early riser. Frank takes the dog out, and when he comes back in, she’s dressed for work, and doing her makeup.

He pours for both of them, and sets a mug next to her. It’s nice, normal. She wishes she could kiss him for it.

When Karen’s finished, she still has a few minutes to spare before she has to go. She carries her mug around to the back of the couch, and touches his shoulder.

“Let me see your stitches,” she says, and Frank cocks his head so she can look. She runs her thumb across the raised tissue on his scalp. It’s healing well.

“Want me to take these out?”

Frank nods under her hand. “Sure.”

She sets her coffee aside, goes into the bathroom, and comes back with a tiny pair of scissors.

Careful around Frank’s short hair, she snips beside the knot on the first stitch, and slides it out. “Haven’t done this in a while,” she says. “You’d been pretty good about not getting hurt too bad this year.”

She takes the other three out, and walks into the kitchen to throw them in the trash. When she looks back at him, Frank’s bringing a hand up to feel the scar.

“Thanks, Karen,” he says, and she smiles.

 

There’s a fire, suspected arson, in an office building some twenty blocks from the newsroom that afternoon, and Ellison sends Karen and a photographer to the scene. She calls Frank’s cell on her way, to tell him she won’t make it home for dinner.

He offers to bring her some food—he’s just sitting around reading her books, after all—but as much as she’d like to see him, she smiles and says no.

Karen gets something to eat from a cart while she and the other journalists wait for a statement from the fire department and police. They’re all rivals, but she’s gotten to know some of them well in the past couple of years.

When she finally trudges through the front door, it’s after ten, and her hair smells like smoke. She writes up three hundred words and emails it to the copy desk before finally taking a shower and climbing into bed next to Frank.

He’s halfway through her copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s _Never Let Me Go_. She wishes she could read it again for the first time.

Frank rolls out of bed in the middle of the night, and lands hard on the floor. The thump of his body is more than loud enough to wake her.

She sits up, and sticks her head over the edge of the bed. “Frank?”

He’s holding his elbow, his legs still tangled in the sheet. “You pulled the white wire. I mean, you’d told me, but—” Frank grins, digging one hand into his hair. “That—holy shit, Karen. That was incredible.”

She smiles back. “You weren’t so bad yourself.”

He holds her gaze, just like that, but after a few moments, she can see that he’s already switching gears.

Frank heaves a sigh, and sits up with a groan. “I’m sorry,” he says. “This isn’t fair to you.”

“What isn’t?”

“Me bein’ here, keepin’ you up all night.”

She shakes her head at him. “Bullshit. Your memories are coming back. Get back up here, c’mon.”

Slowly, Frank gets to his feet, and tosses the sheet back onto the bed.

She falls asleep with him facing her.

 

When Karen wakes up again, it’s a few minutes before her alarm. Frank’s turned away from her, she can’t see his face, but his breathing is even and quiet, and it feels like a win.

Oscar wakes him by the time her alarm would have, though, and she hears Frank groan and bang around in their bedroom while she’s washing her face.

She goes to work, sends a flurry of emails for a story coming out next week, and attends two meetings and a press conference.

Karen turns her phone’s volume back up as she’s getting ready to leave, and there’s a text from Madani, checking in. Karen calls her back from a cab—Dinah’s fascinated by the fact that Frank’s memory is returning to him in dreams. If Karen could distance herself from it, she would be too. Karen finds herself cautiously optimistic, instead.

Dinah has more questions than Karen knows how to answer, though.

The apartment smells good when she gets home that night. Frank’s picked up some fried chicken—there’s packaging from a deli down the street on the counter—and he’s reconstituting some leftover rice with mushrooms and green onion. There’s broccoli on the stove.

Another sticky note is on the countertop—it just says, _the elevator_.

Karen taps her finger next to it. “You saw this, too?”

He nods, and turns to face her. “Yeah, I did.” He leans back against the edge of the counter, and looks down. “Karen, I—I know this, the past week or so, this must be so hard for you, but you’ve been—I really appreciate the way you’re handling it. I don’t know if I could do the same.”

He’d say she was better off forgetting him and disappear from her life for good.

“Based on what I saw this morning, though—I just want you to know, this guy I was before, if things were different, if he could, if he wasn’t such a fuckup, he’d marry you in a second.”

Karen smiles at him, broad. “Frank—” she starts, and then she can’t stop herself, and wraps her arms around him.

He hugs her back, leaning his head against hers, and then he hums a little, and loosens his hold on her. “There’s one other thing, that I didn’t know if I should write down.”

Karen stands back a few inches. “What is it?”

Frank looks down at his feet. “I, uh, I saw you naked.”

She cracks up. “I’m afraid you’ll need to be more specific if you want a timeframe.”

“That’s not what—the thing is, we had sex without a condom,” Frank says. “And I have to know if you’re, uh—”

“Pregnant?” Karen says, eyebrows raised. “No, definitely not. I’m on birth control, and I just had my period after you left.”

Frank’s shoulders sink, and he sighs, nodding. “Okay.”

Karen reaches for his face, and lets herself make contact, stroking her fingers through his scruff. “Oh, god, have you been stressing out about this all day?”

He nods again, into her hand.

“It’s… not a thing we do every time,” she says softly. “But you asked for it, sometime after we got tested. You liked cleaning me up, after.”

Frank just looks at her, like he’s imagining it. Like he’s remembering it.

And then he says, “I want to know everything about us.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is probably when the timeline I mentioned at the beginning is most relevant. And I'm pulling a sudden tense change, but just, like, go with it. We're going back in time, to the weeks following the end of The Punisher S1.
> 
> HOPE Y'ALL LIKE ROMANCE AND HATE NAZIS!!!!!!!!!!

 

**TEN MONTHS EARLIER**

 

It was barely a week since Homeland made Pete Castiglione official, and Frank was pretty worse for wear. It hurt him to move around, but he didn’t complain, except in his face.

Karen was as honest with him as she could be—she needed Frank to spend time with her. She needed a friend more than she needed a protector.

She had missed him more than she cared to admit.

On some of the nights that he didn’t have group, Frank started coming by with dinner after Karen got off work. It seemed like food was about as far into the lap of luxury as Frank ever let himself go. Eventually he got tired of the restaurants near her place in Brooklyn, though, and began arriving with groceries instead.

She just figured it was hard for him to put the effort in when it was only for himself, and didn’t question it.

Frank had been so isolated for so long. Karen didn’t think he realized the extent of it. He became more and more at ease, every time—he quoted something that David had said to him about routines, but he needed it. She did too.

There were things she could say to Frank that she could say to no one else in her life. Karen had forgotten how good it felt to be so open—they stayed up late talking like she hadn’t since her brother was alive. Sometimes Frank challenged her on a point, but never in a way that made her wish she hadn’t brought it up.

It was the best December she’d had in a long time.

Neither of them had family to spend the holidays with. Sarah told her later that when they called Frank to invite him over for the first night of Hanukkah, the first thing he did was ask if he could bring a plus one.

Karen helped him pick out gifts for the kids.

Frank must have bought some nicer clothes for the occasion too—she hadn’t seen him dressed up since the day he took the stand. Karen wore a great dress, and had Frank’s jacket around her shoulders for half the night, even though she had brought her own coat.

Sarah and David made a spread of heavy, wonderful food, and Zach and Leo taught them to play dreidel with chocolate coins.

Frank drove her home after. The streets were dark and quiet for once, even in New York—the first night of Hanukkah fell on Christmas Eve that year. She invited him inside, half-expecting Frank to turn her down, to say it was late, but he didn’t. They found street parking, and walked back to her place.

In the elevator, she slid her hand into his. Frank turned to her, and started to say something, but the doors opened, and they walked out. He laced their fingers together on the way to her door, and her heart started to beat faster.

Karen had to let go to unlock it. He followed her inside, and didn’t say anything, just turned the deadbolt behind them. She watched him take off his jacket, and toss it over the back of a chair. The collar of his shirt was loose and askew—the tie had been removed before dessert.

Karen chuckled, and came over to fix it. “Thank you for inviting me,” she said, smoothing his collar into position with her fingers. “They’re good people.”

Frank beamed at her. “They liked you, too. I knew they would.” He raised a hand up to touch her hair. And then his eyes dropped to her lips.

She licked them, and leaned in, pressed her mouth to his. For most of a second, Karen was afraid she’d made a mistake, but then he kissed her back firmly, open but not invasive, and she pulled back after, to meet his eyes, check in.

Frank was more than amenable.

It was kind of a lot, just the making out. It wasn’t like going home with someone—they did this knowing their lives would change. Frank helped her unzip her dress, but it was a little chilly in the apartment, and he set about making some tea, like he needed a break.

It got cold before they ever drank it.

 

On Christmas Day, Karen woke up a little sweaty, unused to sharing her winter blankets with another warm body. She shoved the covers down and they lazed around for a while, before finally getting up to make coffee.

She dug a wrapped present out of her dresser after that, and Frank smiled, and pulled an envelope from the inner pocket of his jacket, that she hadn’t noticed the night before.

They sat down on the couch, and exchanged them.

Karen had bought him an empty picture frame, not too frilly, no empty platitudes, and the right size. When Frank realized what it was for, he wrapped her in a hug.

She sighed into his shoulder, and kissed his cheek. “It’s time to put down some roots again, Frank.”

He nodded at her as Karen pulled back, and then looked down at the envelope on her lap. “Open yours.”

It was sealed tight, with her first name in the center, in Frank’s small print. She ripped it open with her finger, and the jagged edge it left made her wish she’d gotten up for a knife. It wasn’t a Christmas card, it was a handwritten letter, on two pages of lined paper from a yellow legal pad.

She read it in silence while Frank looked away, like he felt naked in front of her.

> _Karen,_
> 
> _I keep trying to think of what a woman like you would want or need for Christmas, but all the ideas I have either fall short or are too much for us._
> 
> _I’m not a writer, not like you, so I’ll try to keep this as brief as possible._
> 
> _David and Curt keep asking me what’s going on with us, and I’ve never been able to pin it down. I don’t even know how to describe it. I wasn’t expecting you when we met. I was scared to give a shit about anyone, because that meant that something could be taken from me again._
> 
> _I don’t have many people in my life, and I know you know that. So if I told you that you’re the most important, maybe that doesn’t mean a lot, when the competition is a peg-legged combat medic and a neurotic hacker. But it’s the truth._
> 
> _I want to thank you for being so stubborn, and for kicking my ass so much. Sometimes I think that the only reason I’m still alive is because of you. I know you think you don’t need protecting, and no doubt you hold your own when you need to, but for my own sanity, please let me. Give me a heads up before running straight into the lion’s den, and I’ll be there with you._
> 
> _No matter what it is, if there’s anything you want or need, just ask._
> 
> _Merry Christmukkah._
> 
> _Frank_

She looked up at him, and slid her hand into his hair. Slid into his lap to kiss him. He’d clearly written it before last night, but from Frank, whether he intended it to be romantic or not, it was a love letter—she knew that much.

They stayed that way until her stomach started growling.

Karen didn’t have a lot in the fridge, so they got dressed, and went down to the 7-Eleven for eggs and milk. It was open even on Christmas Day, though no one was out.

She tipped a box of condoms into their basket, and Frank blushed, pulled up the brim of his cap, and kissed her again, in the middle of the aisle, between the travel shampoo and the tampons. He put some more money on his parking meter after that, and they went back up to her apartment.

Frank peeled off her layers, and worshiped her body with his mouth, left light hickeys on her neck and chest, made her orgasm before his underwear even came off.

She’d never slept with a man who gave head without prompting. Karen wondered, fleetingly, how Maria had been able to bear Frank’s long absences, if this was what she was missing, but pushed the thought away almost immediately. It wasn’t her place.

He was so sweet with her, asked before he did anything, let her take the lead. It was a little disappointing—she liked him rough around the edges, and trusted him not to hurt her.

Frank picked up on that pretty quick.

Karen had no intention to send him away when she had days off work, so Frank stashed his truck and made himself right at home through the new year. His range of motion was still a little limited, but they more than made do.

She never saw the inside of Frank’s hovel, but he still kept it, just in case. It took several weeks before his beard was full again, and his haircut was pretty well grown-out. By then, he felt better about being at Karen’s so much in the daylight.

It didn’t feel like they moved in together, not in the traditional sense. Frank didn’t have anything, really, besides clothes and stolen guns. He just showed up one night, after already having a toothbrush at her apartment, and she decided not to let him leave.

He smoothed out the picture of his wife and children behind the glass of the frame, and set it on the table in her living room.

 

Outside the apartment, the world seemed to shift on its axis. Fear, rage, and disbelief were exhausting when felt all at once. The journalists at the Bulletin were always on edge, and getting into shouting matches even when they agreed with each other. Karen had to forbid Frank from spending his days just reading the news, for his sanity and her own.

They watched marches go by in the streets, under her apartment window, and past the church. The crowds were young and livid, driven by stakes on a level that none of them had ever felt before.

Others were self-satisfied. They were showing their true colors, wearing them around like badges of honor, shouting what they used to only whisper. Anything they couldn’t say too directly was cloaked in performative patriotism, in national security, in a concern for resources.

It was turbulent, and seemingly endless.

So when Frank asked her what she thought about getting a dog, it felt like exactly the right thing—a good distraction _and_ a dopamine fix.

The shelters in New York were very sad places, and overrun with pit bulls, since most of the other breeds were lucky enough to have found placement in foster homes. Karen went with Frank to a few shelters, looking for the dog he had known more than a year before. They must have walked past a hundred, half-asleep in the corners of cages and concrete rooms.

It reminded Karen of the prison where she visited Frank, before the trial.

Oscar was six months old, his features still a little out of proportion, and not too jaded to the experience. He was the only one who came up to the glass when Frank crouched down. Frank grinned up at her, and she found herself mirroring it back at him.

They asked to meet him, and a volunteer brought him outside, to a small fenced area, with a patch of grass. Oscar was crazy and wiggly, and about bowled Karen over, but he charmed them both, not that they needed much convincing.

Karen signed the papers, and Frank paid the fee, and the three of them went home.

Karen was glad that Frank hadn’t gone for a dog that needed a lot of emotional help—she had enough on her plate with him.

 

In March, Karen covered a demonstration and counter-protest for the Bulletin. She talked to lots of people—a schoolteacher in a Black Lives Matter t-shirt, a couple of clean-cut white men holding Nazi flags, a rabbi from the synagogue a few blocks away.

She’d never seen a HYDRA lapel pin in real life before. The man wearing it told her that the organization would never die, so long as there were people who believed in it.

Karen asked a high school student whose parents had just been deported about her hopes for the future, and she started crying.

Karen’s press badge didn’t come with a lesson on objectivity in the face of so much raw emotion. It was an impossible task—but Ellison knew that when he sent her there. He wanted something closer to a scathing editorial than a moment-by-moment report. He wanted to bring out the Karen Page that had insulted a bomber on the radio.

It wasn’t a physically violent event so much as a psychologically violent one. One that inspired fear. The symbols, the words, had the power to create wounds all on their own, even if no fists were thrown or knives flashed.

Near the end, while she was getting a quote from a bystander, Karen looked down the sidewalk, and there was Curtis. She had only met the man a couple of times, but it was definitely him, wearing a USMC medic hoodie, and patching up a protestor with a bloody elbow.

Karen got what she needed, turned off her recorder, and approached him as the patient was leaving, and Curt was zipping up his bag.

“That’s the worst injury I’ve seen all day,” she said.

“Yeah, guy fell on some broken glass,” he said, and looked up, before breaking into a smile. “Karen Page.”

She invited him home for dinner. Curt and Frank spent most of it ranting about the meaning of true patriotism, about the importance of holding the government to a certain standard.

A lot of people were under the impression that respect for country meant blindly obeying power.

 

The church wasn’t too far from Karen’s apartment, and once the weather was nice enough, she started taking Oscar to meet up with Frank on Wednesdays after group.

The other veterans all seemed curious about her, and how the hell the Punisher had managed to get with her, but they were respectful. After everything with Lewis Wilson, several of them had read her work, and sometimes they stood around in the parking lot, shooting the shit with her and Frank, and giving Oscar belly rubs.

One of them—the guys called him Mick—lit up a joint one afternoon, and passed it around. Curt had made a disapproving face, like he was a resident advisor in their college dorm, but didn’t refuse his turn, although the woman next to him, Felicia, did.

When it got down to Karen, they all seemed to wait for a reaction, but she took a puff like it was no big, and turned to Frank, eyebrows raised as she exhaled.

He met her eyes, and looked around at them.

Curt smirked. “What’s it gonna be, Frank?”

“I haven’t done this since high school,” he said, as he took the joint delicately from Karen’s fingertips. “Y’all are gonna get me kicked out of the Marines.”

 

For a long time, Karen had known that she loved Frank. She didn’t know exactly when her feelings shifted from _please stay alive_ to _please spend your life with me_ , but after a certain point, those three words were always on the tip of her tongue. They wanted to come out on the phone, and during see-you-laters, and whenever she was particularly happy.

She couldn’t tell how Frank would respond, though. She didn’t know how complicated it would feel for him to say it back to her, whether that was even something he had room to give her.

But she knew, from the way he treated her, from everything he said, that he did, as much as he could. That felt like enough, and she decided not to push it.

It ended up slipping from her mouth during sex, though, “Fuck, I’m so in love with you,” and Karen kind of hated herself for it—that he might doubt her seriousness, that she hadn’t thought it through, picked exactly the right moment, said it exactly the right way. She froze there, straddling him, but couldn’t make herself take it back.

Frank read the alarm on her face and sat up, brought his hands to her cheeks, kissed her.

“I love you, too,” he said, soft, into her mouth. “Don’t you know that?”

Karen nodded against his forehead, and wrapped her arms around him. “Yeah, Frank,” she said, gripping him tight. “I know that.”

 

Near the end of April, Frank went out and bought a punching bag, and some good gloves.

She liked to watch him sweat, get his aggression out, but soon he was waving her over, showing her the moves. Correcting her form with sure hands.

Frank was a good teacher, until they both got too distracted to focus in such close quarters. His shorts didn’t leave much to the imagination.

They had sex right there in the living room, with Karen bent over the arm of the couch—he pounded her so well, so deep, her head felt fuzzy before she even came.

Two days later, he brought home gloves for Karen, and punch mitts, too.

 

Zach Lieberman joined a competitive soccer league that summer—New York City had no shortage of youth programs, so long as you had the money—and David invited Frank and Karen to one of the games.

They sat in the stands, and made regular chit-chat, David and Frank in the first row, working through a bag of chips, while Leo, Karen, and Sarah sat in the row behind them, narrating the game.

They got talking about women in sci-fi, eventually—Leo had just watched _The Fifth Element_ for the first time with her dad, and wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Upon learning that she’d never seen _Contact_ , Karen turned to David with a fake-stern look and said, “What kind of nerd _are_ you? Your daughter wants to be an engineer. Get with it, Dad.”

David turned forty-one a couple of weeks later, and Karen and Frank arrived at their house for dinner with a bottle of wine, a fresh salad, and a DVD for Leo.

The bottle went quick over a nice dinner, and Sarah opened another before they brought out the cake. Zach lit the candles, and Sarah grabbed her camera. She’d gone back to using film, after David’s return—she wanted something she could touch, which meant that sometimes Karen and Frank received photos in the mail.

It felt like having family.

David beamed around at them before he blew the candles out.

 

They took the subway out to Washington Heights near the end of July, where Karen was meeting a source for the first time.

The train wasn’t too busy for noon on a Saturday, and with most people wearing headphones, it was quiet enough to be able to listen in on the few people talking around them. Karen wasn’t paying attention, though, not until Frank bristled next to her.

There was a man holding onto a pole by the door, talking shit to someone. When she craned her neck to look, Karen could see a teenage girl on the bench seats, in skinny jeans and a black hijab, clutching her backpack to her chest.

She listened closely, and the man was saying something about first responders—his uncle had been one.

She watched Frank’s grip tighten on the handrail.

“Don’t make a big scene or you’ll end up on YouTube,” Karen hissed in his ear. “I’ll go sit with her first, and then you follow.”

Frank nodded once. Karen got up, and made her way around a few people standing, toward the back of the car.

The girl’s mouth was set in a thin line. There was an empty seat to her left, so Karen took it. “What a prick,” Karen said, and stared the man down.

She turned to Karen, slowly, and nodded. “Tell me about it.”

He opened his sneering mouth and scoffed at them, but Frank was already working his way down the aisle.

Frank stopped by the door too, as if he just wanted to get off at the next stop. But he edged closer, too close for comfort, and grasped hold of the same pole.

“The fuck you think you know about terrorism? I was _in_ the American Taliban,” Frank said in the guy’s ear, just loud enough that Karen could hear him over the rails. “If you don’t get off at this next stop I will throw you out, you piece of shit.”

He shut up, and the three of them stared at him in silence until the doors opened, and he walked out.

When Karen asked the girl if she was all right, she shrugged and said, “I grew up here.”

 

Back in November, at the office on election night, when enough votes had come in that the bigger news agencies were calling it, Karen had curled up under her desk and cried. When she came back out and sat down in her chair, there was a new bottle of bourbon on her desk, with a note in front of it.

It was Ellison’s handwriting, three words— _Get to work._

Karen’s not sure that she did, is the thing. She let herself get distracted, let too much fall through the cracks. And the Bulletin was selling more copies than they had in ten years.

She’d missed a lot, at the times when it would have been most relevant to say something. There was just too much going on. Sometimes, she didn’t want to see it. Other things were easier to write about.

When Karen found the first of the news articles, from a local paper in Utica, she knew exactly why the Bulletin hadn’t covered it. A string of political scandals that week had taken over everything. There were more attacks, in the weeks following. She checked the New York Examiner, but they hadn’t run anything in print either.

And Karen had been more interested in nurturing her new relationship with Frank. Instead of the office feeling like her only sanctuary, she was excited to go home every night.

That hadn’t happened to her in a long time.

The church fire in New Jersey, though—the Bulletin ran the AP story about it. The police were calling it arson, but in the weeks afterward, it was clear they didn’t have evidence to convict, or maybe it went missing.

As a kid, Karen had always imagined the valiant ways she would have reacted during important events in history, times that required action while too many stood by.

This was a time like that, and there were only so many resources at her disposal. The Bulletin’s influence on public opinion could only do so much. Upon looking into them, it wasn’t a question of whether every member of the Röter Schlangen should die. It was a question of whether Frank should be the executioner.

Whether she could stand to send him off to war herself.

 

Over the first weekend in August, Karen finished her preliminary research. She printed it all out, and went to find Frank, who was on the couch, reading a book. He marked his place and set it aside when he saw her face.

She held the kill list by one corner, picking at the staple through them with her thumbnail. “There’s something I need to tell you, but I want you to promise me something first.”

He nodded, intrigued. “Okay.”

“If you decide you want to do this, you have to come back to me when it’s done,” Karen said. “If you die, or if you get caught, it’s not worth it to me. There’s always going to be assholes.”

Frank squinted at her, and cocked his head to the side. “Are you giving me a target?”

She nodded, and handed him the list. “Sixteen of them.”

There were ten full pages. She had done a write-up about each of the members, with photos, known affiliations, job histories, criminal records, and a few choice quotes from manifestos and social media posts.

Frank turned the pages, skimming through it. “There’s a couple cops on this list.”

“I know.”

“How’s that saying go,” he said, looking up at her. “Only good Nazi is a dead one?”

Several of the New York members of Röter Schlangen met up once a month, so once they figured out when and where, that’s what Frank would plan the attack around. The others, he’d have to track down one by one.  

The next day, they ran it by David together, in person. She was still halfway through her spiel when David turned to his computer and sighed.

“Sarah’s gonna kill me,” he said, and put Karen’s write-up next to his keyboard for reference. “But, yeah—whatever you need. I can get it.”

“You don’t need to be any more involved than intel,” Frank said. “I promise, David. I’m not asking you to be in my ear. They won’t see me coming. I’ve handled guys way more dangerous on my own.”

David’s frowning, though. “Are they gonna know it was the Punisher? Cause the last thing we need is a bunch of Nazis out for revenge, Frank,” he says, and picks up the list again. “You might get everyone on here, but that’s just a few. The rest, they’ll fight back. Someone else could pay for this, antifascist groups, anyone they hate—”

Frank nodded. “We talked about that. I’ll use their own guns, make it look internal. I’ve done it before.”

“Okay,” David said. “And… my German’s not great. Röter Schlangen? Do I wanna know what that means?”

“It means ‘red snake,’” she said, with a barely-concealed grin, and flicked out her tongue.

He snorted. “Guess we’ll just have to make sure this one’s head don’t grow back.”

 

On the last night, Frank was inside her, slow, steady, like he had all the time in the world. She kept that pace with him and tried to believe it too, that everything would be all right.

That she, that they, weren’t risking everything they had to try to make a difference.

When they were done, he sat up at the edge of the bed, naked, and looked back at her.

“You come back to me, Frank,” she told him, tucking a pillow under her head. “I swear, if you don’t, I’ll kill you myself.”

A smile tugged at Frank’s lips, but he nodded straight. “I promise. I promise I will.”

He leaned down on an elbow and mouthed at the skin between her breasts. Karen held him there with her fingers curled in his long hair, and leaned down to kiss the top of his head.

Frank shaved it all off afterward, and rubbed his smooth jaw over her skin when he came back to bed. He slept for a scant few hours, and left before the sun came up.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for your patience. I really hope you like this chapter! ♥

 

Frank has his head in his hands for a long time.

“I wish I could remember that,” he says. “I want to remember you, but the rest—I don’t want it _all_ back, y’know.”

Karen nods. “I know.”

The sun set hours ago, but he’s still listening to her. They’re on the couch—she’s leaning against the opposite armrest from Frank, her legs curled up between them. Oscar’s asleep on the floor, snoring softly.

The letter’s laying open on the coffee table. For as long as he spent looking at it, Frank must have read it three or four times. Two plates from their slapdash dinner are stacked beside the letter, holding only crumbs.

And then, of course, there’s the folder, sitting open, faces of dead Nazis crossed out with Sharpie. Frank had flipped through it carefully, his eyes lingering on the grainy faces like he might remember a bullet through them. It’s clear evidence of premeditated murder, and Karen should really destroy it, but she lives with the Punisher. His fingerprints are all over the apartment. His life is all over it.

“Can I ask what you did?” Frank asks, after a period of silence.

“Huh?”

“You made it sound like you’d confessed something to me. Something you couldn’t tell other people.”

Karen sighs. “It’s a long story.”

“Been hearing a lot of those tonight.”

“Yeah, I guess you have,” she says, and smiles. She hasn’t told this story since the last time she talked to Frank about it.

Beyond their dealings within the prison, Frank hadn’t given two shits about Fisk—he was out for himself like all the rest of them. But she may as well start at the beginning. It feels like a decade ago instead of just three years.

“While you were on your last tour in Afghanistan, this guy named Wilson Fisk was trying to take over Hell’s Kitchen,” Karen begins. “He was wealthy, powerful, and he thought that by buying the loyalty of criminals, gentrifying everything, tearing down tenement buildings, he was going to make this city safe. Reinvent it.”

Frank grunts. “Sounds a bit too familiar.”

“Yeah,” Karen says, but doesn’t crack a smile. “I was working with Nelson and Murdock at the time—we had a client who was being kicked out of her home, and we needed dirt on Fisk. And—” Karen sighs, and presses a hand to her forehead. “I did something stupid, went to visit his mother, dragged a friend along with me. I got chloroformed by Fisk’s henchman the next night. Woke up in an old warehouse by the docks, and the gun was on the table between us.”

Frank’s eyebrows raise in anticipation. “You shoot him?”

She nods. “Seven times. I took the gun and ran. Never told anyone, until you.”

“Sounds like pretty standard self-defense to me.”

Karen smirks, and shakes her head. “Not when your only friends are a judgmental Catholic lawyer and a totally vanilla scaredy-cat. And not when Wilson Fisk could find out you killed his right hand.”

He’s watching her carefully, unsatisfied. “There’s gotta be more to it than that.”

Karen presses her lips together, and shakes her head again. “I wanted to do it, I chose to,” she says, her voice hard. “He threatened everyone I cared about. And not long after, Ben—” Karen heaves out a breath, presses her hand to her mouth. “He was a good man, he was my _friend_ , and Fisk killed him in his own home. That’s on me. I lied to get him to go there with me, and now he’s dead.”

Frank cocks his head to the side. “Karen, you—”

She huffs, and cuts him off. “It wasn’t the first time for me. I thought that if you were a monster, then I was, too. Even after everything you did, I wanted you to still be a human being, because maybe that meant that I could be one.”

Karen can feel his eyes on her still, but he says nothing. She crosses her arms in front of her chest, and looks down at her lap.

“Okay,” Frank says. “Listen, jury’s still out on me, but I know you’re not a monster. You’re just not.”

She can’t help the smile that breaks through, and Karen sniffs. “How would you know?”

 

Karen wakes on Saturday feeling a little like she has a hangover. She stays in bed while Frank gets up to take the dog out, and pulls the covers over her head to block out the light.

She hadn’t wanted to make him uncomfortable, to go too overboard with the details of their life together. It’s not like she revealed every detail, she didn’t come on to him, but she wasn’t clinical about it either. She doesn’t think she could have told their story without being transparently, desperately in love with him, though.

The fear wracks her, makes her breathing turn shallow, as she turns what she’d said the night before over in her head. That Frank would take this information and decide to leave.

Maybe she’s just paranoid, but maybe she’s not.

She hears him come back in, hears Oscar trotting around the apartment, and then nothing for a while, until he enters the bedroom. Karen peeks out from under the blankets—he’s standing in the doorway.

“You okay?” he asks, soft.

Karen nods, clearing her hair out of her face, and sits up.

Frank bends to pick up a shirt from the floor, and tosses it in the hamper. “What do we usually do on weekends?”

They never went out much, beyond the occasional late-night dinner or taking Oscar to the dog park. Oscar could usually figure out where they were going by the time he was a block from the apartment, and would prance the rest of the way there.

If there was time on the way, they’d stop by a bakery with the best amandine croissants that Karen’s ever had. Frank usually stood outside with the dog while Karen went in to place their order, along with two coffees.

“I’ll show you,” she says.

 

Oscar’s so distracted by the other dogs, he doesn’t even bother with Frank and Karen, sitting on a bench in a less-occupied corner of the park and splitting a warm, flaky amandine.

She watches Frank’s face as he eats his share, and from the way his eyes close and his chews slow, it’s a hit. He eats the stray almonds from inside the bag, too, and licks his fingers clean.

“Fuck, that’s good,” he says. “Thank you.”

“Well, I couldn’t possibly have known you would like it,” Karen says, with a shrug and a smile. “Clearly, I have the third eye.”

Frank nods like that’s totally reasonable. “Oh yeah, you’re a regular Zoltan machine.” Karen snorts, but Frank continues, straight-faced. “We could take you up to Coney Island, set up a booth, y’know. Step right up, folks, seventy-five cents, and she can tell me my favorite color—”

“It’s green,” Karen interjects. “Just like your aura.”

He breaks into a smile, easy as anything, and crumples their trash into a ball. “I’ll tell you what, I’ve got a vision for ya,” Frank says. “You’re ticklish behind your knees.”

Karen tenses up immediately, shrinking away on their bench, like he would prove it.

“I’m not wrong, then,” he says, swiping his thumb over the corner of his mouth. “I think you kicked me in the chin once because of it? About cracked a tooth.”

Karen nods. It’d been a reflex. “Sorry,” she says. “Couldn’t help myself.”

 

The trees lining the sidewalk are turning orange in places, now. The wind has left leaves in the dry gutter, and Oscar traipses through them, even though he’s panting and moving slower after his romp in the park. Another couple with a terrier starts towards them, and Oscar’s lead gets shortened considerably, until he’s at Frank’s heel.

Karen watches Frank adjust his hood as the couple passes them. The beard had always done a better job of obscuring his face, but it’s also not clear that he’s actually worried about it.

She hasn’t called him Pete in months. If they’re in public, she just doesn’t use his name at all.

They’re still a few blocks from the apartment when a _BANG!_ comes from behind them, sudden and deafeningly loud—and before it can even register, Frank has dragged her into an alcove. Oscar yelps from the abrupt yank on his collar, and Frank’s hands press Karen into the corner.

He stands over her, cages her in while three smaller pops follow, a few seconds apart, and Karen sighs, and sags against the building. It’s a marble façade, dark with grime from the street. She’ll probably have to wash this shirt.

“Just a truck backfiring, I think,” Karen says, and lifts a hand to his cheek. “It’s okay.”

She hasn’t felt him touch her like this in so long.

Frank nods, and looks down. “Sorry, I—manhandled you there,” he says, but Karen smiles, and shakes her head.

“You’ve got a good track record with that,” she says, rubbing her thumb through his stubble until he meets her eyes again. “Trust your instincts.”

Frank holds her gaze for a little too long, long enough for Karen’s eyes to flicker down to his lips, and then he steps back.

 

Karen watches Frank’s body shift from fight-or-flight mode into something a little looser during the last of their walk home, but he doesn’t seem to fully relax even in the elevator.

Once they’re inside the apartment, she fills Oscar’s bowl with cool water from the sink, and Frank collapses onto the couch.

Frank groans. He’s still a little keyed-up.

She chuckles. “You want a drink, too?”

She can hear him sigh before he says, “Sure.”

Pulling two beers from the fridge, Karen opens them, and brings them over to the couch. Frank turns to her when she sits down next to him, and nods as he takes the beer.

“I feel like I said too much last night,” Karen says.

He shrugs. “I’m missing a lot of time, Karen.”

“No, I—” Karen looks away. “I should have kept it PG, the stuff about us.”

“I asked you to tell me, I wanted to know everything about us. I’m sure what you told me last night isn’t all of it.”

“You have more questions?”

He smirks, and raises his bottle toward her. “Not about that.”

“Okay, shoot,” she says, and brings her own beer to her lips.

“Have there been any close calls, where I got recognized with you? You ever been questioned by the police?”

As she swallows, her mind flashes first to the sidewalk with Hayley—the surprise on her face, the incredulous _Frank?_ , like he was just a friend she hadn’t seen in a long time, instead of a vigilante.

There was another, in January, a drunk dude outside a bar in the Bronx—he was standing on the sidewalk with a few others, and they’d hollered at Karen, run their mouths enough for Frank to turn around and face them.

She figured they hadn’t even seen Frank when they started in—it was pitch dark out, and he was wearing all black anyway.

“Yo, dude,” the guy said, in lieu of any other reaction. “Are you the Punisher?”

He said it too loudly for Karen’s comfort.

“Might be if you keep talkin’,” Frank had replied, evenly, and let Karen steer him away, her hands tucked around his elbow.

And then of course, Brett Mahoney—she probably owes her life to him as much as she does to Frank, even if Brett never jumped in front of a bullet for her.

She sighs, and nods. “Once or twice on the street. And I’ve got a friend, sort of, in the NYPD, who doesn’t hate you.”

Frank’s lips wrap around the beer bottle as he takes a long swig. He sits back, puts one foot up on the edge of the coffee table, and opens his mouth then, like he wants to say something, but nothing comes out. Frank winces.

“What is it, Frank.”

He scrubs a hand through his hair before looking back at her. “I still don’t understand how we could have possibly justified this.”

She’s told him everything, and they’re still at square one. “Hey,” Karen says, reaching her arm across the back of the couch, until her hand makes contact with Frank’s shoulder. “Don’t you think I know that we’re fucked up?”

He shakes his head and sighs. “Your life can’t possibly be worth the risk of loving me.”

She cocks her head at him, scratching her fingernails lightly into the sleeve of his shirt, and tries to smile. “Well, I still do. Love you. It’s not supposed to be rational.”

Frank just looks at her, and presses his lips together.

“Listen,” she says, sliding her bottle onto the table. “I’m not some damsel. It’s not up to you to take care of me, all right? I’ve got plenty of my own baggage. I used to be afraid of myself, what I’m capable of. But I’m not anymore.”

The corner of his mouth curls up, and Karen has to lift her arm as Frank bends his elbow to sling it around the back of the couch. He opens his hand, and after a moment, Karen lets hers slide into it.

“Can’t imagine you scare easy at all,” he says, rubbing his thumb over her knuckles.

“I’m good at hiding it when need be,” Karen replies, hoping that the way she’s marveling at their clasped hands won’t show on her face. She squeezes his fingers, and looks up to meet his eyes. “I’m afraid you’ll never be who you were before.”

 

Very early on Sunday morning, in a half-asleep haze, maybe in a dream, Karen can’t turn over, because there’s a warm body behind her, a heavy, muscular arm around her, inside her shirt, a hand resting over her sternum, skin to skin.

It feels so good, he smells so good, and she smiles, and sleeps on.

When Karen wakes for real, Frank’s hand is cupping her breast, kind of lazily, the way he does when he’s kissing her—and she realizes that he must not know he’s doing it.

She’d have loved this a few weeks ago, pressed her ass back against his morning wood, swallowed his waking groans, coaxed a gentle orgasm from him before getting up. But instead of encouraging his touch, she has to wake him from what is likely a _great_ dream, after so many bad ones.

Karen slides a hand carefully into her shirt, and wraps her fingers around Frank’s wrist. She starts to draw it out, and there’s a gasp in her ear.

She clenches her eyes shut.

Frank says, “Oh, fuck,” but it’s not breathy, it’s not soft and turned-on as it rolls off his tongue—it’s harsh, panicked, lodged in his throat, and in the space of a second, Frank’s at the other edge of the bed, and then he’s off of it entirely.

She can’t look at him, can’t turn over and see him standing there, deeply uncomfortable with the fact that he’d touched her, and likely going limp. She takes a shaky breath in, and covers her face.

“Karen, I—” he starts, but doesn’t finish the sentence.

She hears the jingle of Frank’s belt as he puts on his pants, and the bedroom door opening, Oscar’s paws on the floor. It’s not long before the front door to the apartment closes behind them.

 _He took the dog_ , she thinks. _He’ll come back._

Karen focuses on her breathing, and waits.

It’s still dark out, and Karen lays in bed for a while, but after about twenty minutes, she gets up and puts on coffee. The itch to keep moving isn’t lessened by the caffeine, so Karen goes to the hamper in their closet and sorts her laundry. She doesn’t include Frank’s clothes—somehow that would feel just as intimate as him feeling her up in his sleep. It’s just another element of their old routine, a reference to a movie that Frank hasn’t seen.

Karen takes it all down to the laundry room in the building’s basement. She brings a book, too, and stays down there until her clothes are done. Karen’s work-wear delicates and three chapters of a secondhand paperback are only able to distract her for so long, though.

He’ll come back. But that doesn’t mean he’ll stay, not if he doesn’t want to.

It’s too soon to call Curtis.

When Karen returns to the apartment with a basket of folded clothes and an armful of damp blouses, Frank’s there. He’s sitting on the couch, hands folded over his knees.

She takes the basket into the bedroom, and starts hanging her shirts up before they wrinkle.

It’s cowardice, and a little spite, and a need to focus on something else.

There’s no sound from the other room, at least not above the rattle of hangers. She turns to pick up another blouse, but freezes when she sees it—the same bag she’d packed for him after he went to stay with Curtis, now full to bursting. It’s on the floor by the bed.

Most of his side of the closet is gone.

She hears Frank’s boots on the floor after that, and when she turns around, he’s in the doorway.

“Hey,” he says, softly.

Blood rushes in her ears, and Karen looks down at the blouse in her hand before tossing it over the edge of the basket.

“I’m—I’m sorry about this morning,” he says. “I shouldn’t have stormed out.”

Karen shakes her head, tucking her hair behind her ear. She opens her mouth to say, _it’s okay_ , but it’s not. She says nothing, just crosses her arms in front of her.

Frank looks down at his feet. “But I do think maybe I should go stay at my old apartment for a while.”

Karen knows the answer, but she has to ask. “Maybe, or you’ve decided to?”

He sighs. “I think I need to just spend some time by myself, you know?”

Karen nods, but doesn’t say anything lest her voice break.

“It’s not anything you did, Karen. I promise. I just—I was thrust into this world with you, and I still don’t know who I—” Frank stops short, and looks up at her. “I can’t be what you need right now.”

“Frank, you don’t have to—”

“No, you’re still—” Frank says, and huffs. “You’ve been generous enough. This isn’t the right thing, not right now. I can’t ask it of you, and I can’t let you give it to me.”

Biting her lip, Karen looks away. He’s not wrong, she knows that, even though it hurts—his ability to say this to her, his emotional awareness, is a big reason why she loves him in the first place.

“I’ll take Oscar during the week, if that would be easier for you.”

She can’t hold it back after that, and shoves her hand over a sob. It _would_ be easier. Karen looks back at him, and nods.

As if on cue, the dog noses around Frank’s legs, and Karen forces a smile, and stoops as Oscar steps on her feet. “Hey, boy,” she says, and scratches just the right spot on his neck, before finally kneeling down, and letting Oscar lick her ears.

“Be a good dog,” she whispers, before pressing a hard kiss to the top of his head.

 

The apartment is silent without them. When Karen gets back from the office late on Monday night, she kicks off her shoes in the hall, and leaves them there.

She used to love living alone—she could decorate however she wanted, never had to fight anyone over the food or the bathroom. Back then, she didn’t know she was missing anything.

Karen reheats dinner for one, and stares at her empty side table.

In the next few days, she gets a lot of work done, though, stays late at the office the way she used to, throws herself into a couple of articles. Ellison actually frowns at her when he leaves before she does three nights in a row.

She dreams, and Frank doesn’t respond to her, not like he’s ignoring her, but like he just can’t hear, and she can’t get her voice above a whisper. He walks around with a stick like Matt’s, but still runs into things.

She dreams, and he smiles at her, wraps his hands around her swollen belly, talks softly, lovingly to a being inside her, like it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him. 

Karen’s not sure which is scarier, which is the nightmare. Which is supposed to make her so sad she can’t go back to sleep. She spreads her own hand over her thigh and wishes it was someone else’s, there to claim her, to get her attention, to take her home.

When Karen finally calls Curtis, he answers the phone with a sigh, and tells her that Frank had showed up to group like usual, but hadn’t said a word to anyone.

Curtis had also been the one to tell Frank the address of his old apartment. From the timing Curt describes, Frank must have called after he left with Oscar, on their last morning. Whether his body knew her or he was imagining someone long dead, she almost doesn’t want to know.

“Frank’s got some shit to work out,” Curt says into the phone, soft. “I don’t think it has anything to do with you, he’s just—”

She nods even though he can’t see her. “Yeah, that’s what he said. Doesn’t feel particularly helpful, though.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Karen.”

“Thanks, Curt.”

 

A sleek blue Mustang speeds past Karen on her way to work on Friday morning. It’s several years newer than Madani’s totaled hot rod, but she reaches into her pocket for her phone.

Karen’s been avoiding Dinah’s unforgiving straight-talk, but she can’t anymore. She presses the phone to her ear while she’s still three blocks from the office. It’s early enough that Dinah will probably pick up.

“Miss Page,” Dinah starts. “Was wondering when you’d call.”

“Hi,” Karen says, her eyes flicking around her out of habit. “I uh, I feel like I should tell you that he’s moved out of my apartment, and I don’t know how long he’ll be gone.”

“Oh, shit,” Dinah says. “Fuck, what happened.”

Karen cringes, and sighs, sidestepping some broken glass on the sidewalk. “I don’t wanna talk about it on the phone. You got time on your lunch break?”

Madani agrees. At a quarter to one, they get overpriced coffees from a cart in Midtown and walk. 

“So you guys hadn’t even kissed,” Dinah says, as they fold themselves onto a park bench.

Karen shakes her head. “No. Nothing.”

“He probably felt like he was assaulting you, Karen. It doesn’t matter if you wouldn’t have turned him down.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Dinah sighs, and lays her arm across the back of the bench, leaning in. “He doesn’t want to hurt you, you know that right? The cruel thing would be for him to sleep with you when he’s not in it.”

“He’s _been_ sleeping with me. Not well, but.”

Dinah scoffs, and sends her a cutting look. “Was _that_ a smart idea?”

“I don’t know!” Karen says, a little petulant. “It’s his bed too.”

“Karen. Come on.”

“Look, it’s not like this situation came with a manual,” Karen says. “I never know what the right move is. I just thought it would help him.”

“Yeah, but you still knew this wouldn’t end well. It’s not something you can make better, not really.”

Karen balls her hand into a fist. This is why she wasn’t excited for Madani’s opinion, regardless of her practical relationship with Frank.

“You can’t control it,” Dinah says softly, shaking her head. “I know you know that.”

Karen breathes in deep, and nods as she lets it out. “I’ve known he would leave me since he was in your parents’ guest bedroom, Dinah.”

Dinah raises her eyebrows, her mouth opening like she’s stuck on saying _ah_ , like she’s got Karen all figured out. “I’m going to play my mother here for a second and make you break that down for me, because I don’t think you’ve said it to anyone.”

“What?”

“I want to know why you think he’ll leave you.”

“He just _did_ ,” Karen says, throwing her hands up, sloshing some coffee onto the lid of her cup. “The last thing he remembers is being in bed with Maria, and now he’s expected to just pick up two years later with some girl he doesn’t know?”

Dinah smirks back. “You’re not _some girl_ , Karen.”

“I am when his fucking wife’s dead,” Karen says through her teeth. “He stayed with me because he needed someone, and maybe some sense of duty to his former self. But we weren’t together, and he fucking _knows_ how much I would sacrifice to keep him around.”

Dinah sighs, and nods, like she’s backing down, like Karen passed some sort of test. Part of her is pissed off about Dinah’s condescension, but Karen just closes her eyes, and drags a hand through her hair.

“I’d walk through fucking fire for him, Dinah. But he’s not _mine_ anymore. He’s just not.”

 

Frank calls before he comes by with Oscar on Saturday morning. He’d bought his own dog food, so Frank just hands over the leash in the doorway.

Oscar wags his tail and pants at her as she lets him into the apartment. He bounds toward the living room, and finds a squeaky toy that’s hiding under the couch.

Frank’s still in the hall.

She doesn’t expect him to walk in, but smiles when he does—and then he’s closing the door behind him. He doesn’t turn the deadbolt. He’s not staying.

Frank takes off his hat, though, like some kind of gentleman, with the same movement she’s seen a thousand times, the old-fashioned chivalry shit that had always, always worked on her. It makes her heart clench.

“Look, I know I said I’d take him during the week,” he says. “But, uh. I’ve been rereading everything you and David wrote up, and I think I’m gonna go finish the job.”

Karen’s mouth drops open, and she steps closer, wide-eyed. “What? Are you sure?”  

He nods. “I feel like maybe, once I do this, y’know, everything else will start making sense. They deserve to die, and it’s better than just sitting around all day.”

“Well, you’re not going alone.”

He looks at her like she’s crazy, and shakes his head. “You’re not coming with me.”

“No, but _Curt would_ ,” Karen replies, firmly. “He told me before, he would have gone with you. David would want to help, too.”

“It’s not their fight.”

“Oh, you think it’s not?” Karen snaps. “What, you think it’s more mine than theirs? I’m just a race traitor, Frank.”

He pulls a chair out from the table, and slumps into it. “I’m not gonna ask Curt to put himself on the line like that, Karen. He’s got a life, and I can handle it on my own. It doesn’t matter if I get caught—I’m still the Punisher.”

Karen sits down across from him. “You got a strategy at least? Murder-suicide won’t work when everyone’s spread out. They have to be picked off one by one.”

He nods. “I know. They got beef with few other factions. Was gonna just shop from one of their arsenals, that was the plan before.”

It’s way too general, way too cavalier for a plan of action. “Okay, which one? Where are they? When?”

He brings a hand up to scratch at his forehead. “The ones up in Rochester, don’t know when yet. Are you always such a pain in my ass?”

“Yes,” Karen says, without missing a beat. “ _Someone’s_ gotta keep you in check.”

Frank chuckles, and covers his eyes.

“Please,” she says. “Be careful. These people are serious.”

He sighs and nods, spreads his legs more, leans forward like he’s getting up.

Karen can’t stop herself, and just bursts out with it. “Look, Frank, you don’t owe me anything,” she says, louder than she means to. “But please come back. Don’t make this your last stand.”

“Okay,” Frank says. He gets to his feet, and walks out.

 

She doesn’t have to wait long to hear from David. Frank had requested an updated report on the remaining members. He’s been studying their whereabouts, going back over Karen’s notes, scouring Google street view for possible sniper’s nests. Plotting their deaths.

Curt calls her too. Their voices are tight, but hopeful, and she wishes they would tell her exactly what they think about Frank going off alone, even though he’s done it many times before.

She doesn’t ask either of them if they think he’ll come back.

Frank calls eventually, too, just to say that he has everything in order, and gives her a rough timeline. She doesn’t know what to make of that, other than he doesn’t want her to worry. Or maybe he’s treating her like the CO—she may as well have orchestrated the whole thing, after all.

Frank Castle is a lot of raw power to have at her whim. Although that whim has been much more limited, as of late.

On the following Thursday, when Karen gets home from work, Oscar is waiting inside. The chips she’d left out on the counter the night before have been put away, far from the dog’s reach.

Karen opens her relevant news feeds, shoots David a text, and fills Oscar’s bowl.

There’s a sticky note on the counter, like the fragments of memories he used to write down while Karen was at work. She’s almost afraid to read it, but she does, and immediately feels silly, because all the note says is, _I’ll be back._

Maybe he’s forgotten _Terminator_ along with everything else. Or maybe he’s trying to be funny. Or trying to give her too much hope.

Karen pours herself a shot of bourbon, and throws it back.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. Mind the rating change (or don't). Lots of spoilers for this chapter in the tags/warnings, unfortunately--we've got short descriptions of the last few Nazis on the list and their deaths, a glorious reunion, rough sex, romantic schmoop, etc.

 

The official reports come in frustratingly slowly, one at a time, over the course of two weeks. They’re unconnected at first, different jurisdictions, and they each have a delay of twelve hours to three days. The unreleased names and some other details are supplemented by a few clicks from David.

The first is Russell Weston, 53 years old, of Scranton, Pennsylvania, shot point-blank after the security cameras in his home were disabled. The body was discovered by his brother, Terry. One bullet casing found at the scene, rolled under a couch.

Another, Richard Ziegler, found in his home in the foothills of the Catskills, shot in the head and chest, dog shut away in a bathroom. Body draped with an Iron Cross flag, soaked through with blood—pushpins on the floor near the body and corresponding holes in the wall indicate that it had been previously hanging above his desk.

Seemingly unrelated, there’s a third, this time in New Jersey, Officer Gerald Kinsey of the Trenton PD. He’s found dead in his garage by his wife and eight-year-old daughter. Blood is splattered all over the driver’s side of his truck. He has a domestic abuse record a mile long and has been investigated multiple times for unlawful use of force while on the job.

The police department tries to keep it under wraps at first, but word gets out. Karen watches a stream of the press conference, if it can be called that. The chief is tight-lipped and doesn’t give much beyond dates, times, and diplomatic rhetoric. He takes two questions from reporters before leaving the podium.

On the morning that the fourth death is revealed—it’s a guy with a Schutzstaffel tattoo on his fucking face—the editor of the Bulletin’s crime section is practically vibrating with excitement at the morning staff meeting.

Karen likes to think she’s a decent liar, but it’s hard to know how to react as the newsroom erupts with not-so-wild theories about a serial Nazi killer. All she knows is that with the delay, Frank will be done, and probably back in Manhattan, by the time the fifth and final death on the list gets reported.

By process of elimination, that piece of shit will be Miles Avery.

Four human pointer fingers will be found next to his body, each vacuum-sealed and dated, partially thawed like they had been pulled from the freezer.

 

Ellison corners Karen in her doorway after the meeting, and follows her into her office. “I know that look,” he says. “You know something.”

“About what?” Karen asks, as she walks around her desk to sit down.

“These murders, these Red Skull wannabes.”

“I haven’t been assigned to those,” she says. “I know as much as you do, Ellison.”

He squints at her. “Don’t bullshit me, Karen. Is this Castle?”

Karen laughs, and looks away. “You and I both know, they’re investigating—”

“Is. This. Castle.”

She raises her eyebrows. “What do you want, Ellison?”

“Something’s happened to you, Karen. The past month or so. It’s like you went through a breakup or something, but you never talk about anyone.”

“What exactly are you implying?”

Ellison huffs, and glares at her as he backs out of the room. “Don’t move.”

After a couple of minutes, he comes back with a copy of the Examiner, shuts her door too loudly behind him, and slaps the paper down onto her desk. Below the fold, the headline reads, _ELEVEN MEMBERS OF WHITE SUPREMACIST GROUP KILLED IN MURDER-SUICIDE_.

“The cops, they said it was an internal squabble, right? And they don’t really give a shit either way. But now the ones left, they’re dying too.”

Karen nods. “Yeah, and?”

“That doesn’t sound internal. It sounds _external_ , in fact. Connected. What if they’re being hunted. And by someone who knows what they’re doing.”

She makes a face, and shrugs her shoulders. “Why not? Round ‘em up.”

“No, stop it,” Ellison says, and points at the paper, taps it with his finger. “The day before this ran, you started acting weird. And I know that because you didn’t come to Jeanine’s retirement happy hour. You ran out of the staff meeting to take a call that day and then were gone for _three hours_ before you left word that you wouldn’t be back at all.”

Jeanine, from the Business section. Karen had completely forgotten about it—her.

“What would you like me to say, Ellison?” Karen asks, resting her elbows on her desktop. “That Frank killed a bunch of white power scumbags because I said so? That I’ve been distracted and fucked-up because my vigilante boyfriend had yet another head injury? I suppose my work has suffered because of it.”

Ellison frowns. “I don’t deserve that, Karen. Don’t mock me.”

Karen closes her eyes, and breathes out. It’s the dishonesty and the danger that would matter to him, more than the harboring of a fugitive, she knows. He’d never turn her in.

It’s still a relief, though, when she looks up, and he’s swinging her door open, and then he’s gone.

 

Karen watches the news that night from her couch, with Oscar’s head in her lap. There aren’t new details available, no word on who did it, but they’re running through the criminal records of the dead, all the history available publicly. The talking heads keep asking hypotheticals, screaming at each other over whether civility should always be a top priority. Whether acting first against dangerous hate groups is an honorable offense. Whether murder can ever be justified.

Whether a Nazi’s very existence constitutes an act of violence. Whether citizens of the world owe it to the millions of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust to stop them in their tracks.

Whether the Röter Schlangen had it coming—a group most people had never heard of.

They’ve had their fame, Karen thinks. She’s given them that in death, with their comeuppance.

 

Karen goes to work the next day with a prickly feeling of paranoia at the back of her neck.

She makes a few calls in the morning, leaves a few voicemails for a story that’ll run over the weekend. She eats the lunch she’d packed the night before, and then stares at a Word document for long enough that the ringer on her cell phone makes her jump.

It’s an unknown number. She takes a breath, and answers it. “Karen Page.”

“Hey,” the voice says—and it’s tentative, casual, but it’s unmistakably Frank. “You at the office?”

“I am,” Karen says immediately, and gets up to close the door. “You okay?”

“Yeah. It’s done.”

“Good,” she says, resting one hand on her hip. “When will you be back? Or—I mean, back in town—”

Karen hears him chuckle, and a car passing by, and then Frank says, “I’m outside.”

She gasps, and practically _leaps_ toward the window, and shoves the blinds aside.

He’s on the sidewalk, looking right up at her, phone pressed to his ear. “Meet you in the alley.”

Karen hangs up and heads for the elevators.

She’s halfway down to the lobby before she realizes that Frank hasn’t been to meet her at the office since the start of the summer. That he had known _exactly_ where to look.

And then she blinks, and she’s past the front desk and through the doors, on the sidewalk—she rounds the corner two doors down, past the cell phone repair shop, into the alley, and there’s Frank. He’s whole, and he’s smiling, kind of sheepish, with a black eye.

Her feet carry her forward, and it’s just a reaction to seeing the bruise, she’s not even conscious of it—and then Frank’s arms are around her.

“Frank,” she gasps, touching his sandpaper cheeks. “Are you…”

He nods into her hands, and sighs. “Do you hate me?”

“Of course not,” Karen says, shaking her head. “Never.”

She wraps her arms around his neck, and Frank holds her tightly to him, shifting a little from foot to foot, before finally pulling back, and tipping his forehead against hers.

“I drove all night,” he says, on a rough exhale. “I’m so sorry, I—I think I was just in limbo—like I wasn’t supposed to go home before. Unfinished business.”

She pulls back to look at him. “What, it came back just like that?”

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Frank says. “If that ever happens again, just, y’know, send me back out for the double tap.”

She chuckles. “You’re not going _anywhere_ for a while, if I have anything to say about it.”

Frank sighs and nods, a smile pulling at his lips. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Now that we have _that_ out of the way,” she says, and brings a hand up to grasp the front of his jacket. “Are you gonna kiss me or what?”

“Oh, my god,” Frank says, and he does, he opens his mouth and sinks into hers, slides his fingers into her hair. He’s minty, like he just brushed his teeth, when he slips her the tongue, when he turns his head to press closer to her, when he smiles into her mouth.

“I love you so much,” he says, when he breaks the kiss to meet her eyes.

The words feel like physical warmth, and Karen grins. “I love you back, Frank.”

She steps back enough to really see all of him, then. Besides the black eye, he doesn’t look like he just came from a fight. His guns aren’t lingering on his skin and clothes, he’s not bleeding anywhere visible.

“Did you already go home?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says. “Hadn’t taken a shower in... I don’t know how long.”

She licks her lips. “Uh-huh.” She looks toward the street, and back down the alley, before taking Frank’s hand, and dragging him around a puddle, and behind a line of dumpsters. “I’m on a deadline,” Karen says, and shoves him against the bricks.

Frank smirks, looking her up and down. “Y’know, I was gettin’ ready to tell you what a classy lady I think you are,” he says, spreading his legs so she can step between them. “But maybe I’ll just—”

“Maybe you’ll just shut up,” Karen finishes for him, but there’s no teeth in it. She presses his fully-clothed body to the wall with hers, and kisses him until her face is raw.

She can’t _wait_ for the beard to grow back out.

 

When Karen gets home that night, dinner isn’t on the stove—not that it’s his _job_ , but she’s gotten used to it, and she knows he likes doing it. She hangs up her coat next to Frank’s, pats Oscar on the head, and walks through the apartment. It’s quiet.

Karen finds him in their bed, on his stomach, sound asleep. She smiles, and starts stripping off her work clothes, and hanging what she can wear again in the closet.

When she looks back at him, Frank’s leg shifts a little, but he doesn’t turn over, doesn’t wake. She pulls on a t-shirt, crawls over the foot of the bed, and slumps down next to him.

He opens his eyes, and smiles, sliding closer to her, sliding a knee between her thighs. “Hey,” he says, against her lips. “Missed you.”

Karen reaches a hand up to touch his face. “I missed you, too.”

He closes his eyes, and he leans in and kisses her. If she couldn’t feel every inch of him touching her, Karen might suspect this of being a very elaborate dream.

The kiss breaks when he winces, and reaches down to adjust himself. Her eyes follow the movement—he’s hard in his briefs.

Karen smiles, and slides a hand down his chest. “What are we going to do about this?” she asks, teasing the head of his cock through the fabric.

“Anything,” he says on a sigh, and groans. “Uh, hang on a sec, hold that thought.”

Frank kisses her again, and moves back, off the bed. He leaves the room, and she hears him talk softly to the dog before going into the bathroom, and putting the seat up.

Karen sits up, and climbs off the bed to pace at the foot of it, the anticipation making her hands shake a little. She’s folding back the duvet when he comes back in, and she turns, wraps her arms around his neck. He chuckles, kisses her cheek, and holds her to him.

She’s missed the heat of his body, missed the solid, yielding and unyielding nature of him, the way he lets her arrange him, the way he handles her right back. Karen presses closer, and his arms slide down around her waist, his fingertips pushing the hem of her shirt aside to feel her skin.

His cock’s waking up again—she can feel it against her hip.

Karen pulls back, just enough to kiss him. She can’t wait for the look on his face when he feels her pussy—Karen was soaked-through hours ago.

“I thought about this all day,” Karen says. “God damn you.”

He smirks. “Wanted to come home and fuck me, huh?”

She nods, and tugs her shirt over her head. “I want to hear about everything that happened, but I wanna do this first.” Karen sits down at the end of the bed, still in her bra and underwear, and spreads her legs.

Frank nods minutely. “Yes, ma’am,” he says, eyes roving over her body. He sinks to his knees before her, and Karen rakes a hand into his short hair, smiling when he leans into her touch.

It’s the best thing she’s ever seen.

He looks up at her as he grips her panties and tugs them down, and then he’s tossing them aside. Frank slides his hands up her thighs as she spreads them, tucks his first two fingers between the lips of her pussy.

Frank groans a little and licks his lips, slides his fingers through her wetness. He moves in closer on his knees, kisses her stomach, and then, parting her with his thumbs, he swipes his tongue from her entrance up to her clit. Frank closes his eyes as he finds the right spot, and then opens them again, slow.

Karen laces her fingers together behind his head, and he moves down to slide his tongue inside.

“Oh,” Karen says, barely audible, as he strokes her, slow. She bends a leg over his shoulder, and lays back to watch him work.

Frank slides a hand up her ribcage after a moment, and squeezes her breast through the bra, before tucking his fingertips beneath the underwire.

“Hold on,” she whispers. Her hands leave his hair, and she reaches back, and takes it off for him.

His fingers curl around her, his thumb grazing her nipple gratefully, plucking it like a taut string. Karen’s breath shakes, and she can see him smile into her pussy when she moans a little. She wants him in her, to give her everything he’s got.

Karen takes a deep breath, and licks her lips. “I want you so bad, Frank.”

He looks up at her, and brings his other hand up to rub at her clit. He’s still fucking her with his tongue, still making her hyper-aware about how much more she needs. Before long, he’s switching places, sliding his fingers inside her, lapping at her clit. Frank looks up, mouth wide open, and Karen rocks her hips up to meet his face.

She stops him when she’s getting close, though. “Frank,” she says, and hums, impatient, dragging her fingers across his scalp. “Please.”

He lifts his head just enough to smirk at her, smug, and say, “Somethin’ you want?”

She doesn’t bother fighting it, just nods at him. “Fuck me.”

“Not yet,” he says, into her skin, and kisses her thigh. “Not yet.” He closes his eyes, and flattens his tongue.

This is what happens when he’s gonna fuck her brains out, when she’ll feel it the next day, and it’s a work night—Karen could stop him, but she won’t. He’s too good. The whine that leaves Karen’s mouth is high and thready, and she lifts her hand to roll a nipple between her first two fingers.

He slides a third inside her, before circling his tongue around her clit again.

“Just like that, Frank,” Karen says on a sigh, and bites her lip, closing her eyes. “Don’t stop.”

He doesn’t, he’s relentless, like he could swallow her whole. His fingers curl and stroke her from the inside, and his tongue flicks her faster, and she’s—fuck, even when he’s on his _knees,_ even when he’s doing her _bidding,_ she can be made to feel helpless, he knows her body so well. Frank takes her right to the edge, her body quaking with it, until she cries out, gasping, gripping the sheets. Frank’s warm tongue slows as she rides it out, and he groans into her pussy.

She pants softly at him, and brushes her fingers down his cheek. “Oh, I missed you.”

Frank smiles lazily up at her, and kisses her hand and twitching thigh before he stands.

Karen’s hit, then, with the realization that they’re nowhere near finished, and her limbs are already feeling heavy, like an hour after having a drink, like her lips are half-numb. Frank hasn’t even taken off his briefs. He’s gonna _destroy_ her.

She heaves herself up to sit at the edge of the bed, and reaches for his waistband, traces the rigid edge of his cock through the fabric before she tugs them down. The head catches on the elastic, and his length bounces back, right in front of her face.

Karen wraps her hand around him, and looks up at Frank as he wipes his mouth on his wrist.

Before she can lean in, though, he steps back a little, and bends to kiss her. It’s sloppy, and wet, his face smells and tastes like her—she tugs on his lower lip with her teeth as Frank pulls away.

Karen smiles as he straightens up and steps back into her space, as she strokes her fingers lightly over him. She drags the flat of her tongue up his cock, before drawing the head into her mouth. Closes her eyes as her fist settles around the base.

In the beginning, he used to say he didn’t need this; she could tell that receiving _anything_ made him feel guilty in some way. But after so much time was spent with his face between her legs, and after Karen offered several times with enthusiasm, she likes to think that any reservations about it on his part are gone, now. He’s always careful with her, regardless.

His fingers lift to her temples, they tuck her hair behind her ears, and Karen sighs through her nose. His hands have always made her feel cared for, wanted, and she squirms on the bed, ducks her head to take him deep, as his hands move down over her shoulder blades.

Frank moans, and she loses herself in it, the singular focus of sucking him, and she looks up when he slides his fingers into her hair again. Holds his gaze, hollows her cheeks until his breath shakes. She lets his hips rock into her, lets him slide across her tongue.

Karen pulls off, and digs her tongue into the ridge under the head of his cock, right where he’s most sensitive, and like clockwork, he grunts at her, and makes a loose fist.

Karen smiles, and presses kisses up a vein, blinking slowly up at him.

“Yer lookin’ at me like you wanna get railed,” Frank says.

She just nods, almost too far gone to speak.

“Fuck, Karen,” he says, soft, as he lets go of her hair, and trails a finger down her cheek.

He wraps his hand around her throat, almost completely slack, just enough to feel her pulse. He presses her down, though, and she goes willingly to the mattress, licking her lips.

Karen pulls her hair to the side, and grins up at him.

Frank shakes his head as he walks to the dresser, and finds the lube where they left it last time. He drops the tube onto the sheets, steps between her knees again, wraps his hands around her hips, and drags her closer to the edge of the bed.

For a few moments, Frank just looks down at her, spreads his hands across her skin. Karen hums, loving the contact, and then he slides his fingers over her pussy—she’s so wet, but he reaches for the lube anyway. It’s always been the right call when she wants him like this. She bites her lip as she watches him touch himself, slick himself up, and whatever’s still shining on his hand, he works into her—and she grinds onto his fingers.

And then Frank puts a knee up onto the bed, and presses the head of his cock against her. He teases her with it a little as he lines up, she brings a hand down to help him, and slowly, he presses inside her, stretches her open, and reaches down to grip her thighs.

She watches his jaw drop, his eyes half-open like they might roll back, and then finally, finally, when Frank’s pushed inside to the hilt, he leans down, and kisses her through the first few easy, shallower thrusts. He pulls back after that, and she misses his mouth, but he slams into her, hard, and then does it again. She’s glad she’s at the foot of the bed, because their headboard is less than padded.

Frank had been timid about this when they were starting out, too. She’d had to coax the strength out of him, had to ride him until her knees hurt, had to beg him to slap her ass pink.

She loves watching him fuck her like this. Frank’s hands grip her just on the edge of too tight, but it’s grounding, helps her stay in the room, especially right after an orgasm—sometimes there are bruises on her thighs after, purple-green fingerprints. In the morning, he’ll frown at them and apologize, and she’ll press on them in the shower until she can’t see them anymore.

She’s beginning to think it might not have been the best thing to ask for, though. It feels good, but too little of him is touching her. Some part of her is still begging for affection and reassurance. She’s been without him for too long.

Frank’s still inside her when he takes one of her ankles and guides it around in front of him, until her legs are together, and Karen turns onto her side. The new angle hits her just right, and she reaches for Frank’s hand, grips it tight as he slides into her again. The smack of their skin is loud and wet, almost hypnotic in her head, and he’s using his grip on her hand for leverage, now.

But it’s not enough.

“Frank,” she says, under her breath, and then repeats it, louder. “Frank.”

“Yeah, sweetheart,” he says, and pauses, balls-deep, leans over her, kisses her shoulder. “What do you need?”

Karen whimpers, and Frank rubs her hand with his thumb.

“Karen?”

She nods. “Come down here.”

He pulls out of her, and she moves up the bed as he climbs onto it.

Karen makes room for him between her legs, and Frank takes it, just puts his hips there before resting on his elbows, and looking down at her.

He touches her hair, smooths it out of her face. “What is it?”

“I just—” She closes her eyes, leans into his hand. “Need you closer to me.”

“I’m right here,” he says, and kisses her cheek. “Not goin’ anywhere.”

She nods as Frank kisses up to her temple, and her eyes are brimming with tears, and fuck, she didn’t mean to do this. She never does. “I was so afraid, Frank,” she says, and her voice breaks. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t—”

He sighs, and rubs a hand over his face. “You knew I would leave, didn’t you. The whole time. It’s why you wanted to wait to tell me about us, it’s—”

She nods, and sniffs, wiping her eyes. “I didn’t know how to recreate everything we went through, I—”

Frank shakes his head, and chases her fingers with his thumb. “No, Karen, you’re all right.”

Karen bends her knees, and wraps her legs around his waist, cups his face in her hands.

“Hey, you’re all right,” he says, softer, and kisses her palm before he meets her eyes again. “Lemme tell you something. I _wasn’t_ ready to hear everything, Karen. You were a class act. Even if I didn’t understand it. You made the right choices for me.”

She heaves a sigh under his weight. “Really?”

Frank nods. “Yeah. Couldn’t have asked for more from you.”

Karen smiles, and pulls him down to kiss her, bares her neck so he’ll latch on to her, and he does.

He works his way down, past her collarbone, and sweeps her nipple into his mouth. She watches him suck on her, at the way his expression smooths out, the way her skin curves away from his lips. The way his hand moves up to cup the breast his mouth is ignoring, the way he squeezes gently, his hands warm and rough with use, and god, it’s exactly what she wanted.

Frank pulls back, and rests his forehead against hers. “You okay? D’you wanna stop?”

She shakes her head.

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” she says, and kisses him again, and reaches across the bed for the lube. Karen flips the cap to squirt some onto her fingers, and wraps her hand around him.

Frank caresses her while she gets him hard again, traces the lines of her body. He watches her touch herself with the hand she lubed him up with, smiles when she bites her lip.

“You ready?” he says, goading her, teasing her clit with the head of his cock.

Karen nods, and Frank pushes inside her again, and then leans down on an elbow, and kisses under her jaw.

“Feels so fucking good to be inside you,” he says, into her skin.

His cock fills her up so perfectly.

He’s teasing her nipple with his thumb _just_ the way she likes it. Frank lets go of her, though, to hike one of Karen’s legs up around his hip, and Karen lifts her hips up to meet him, and god—she doesn’t have far to go, if he keeps that up.

He kisses her neck, and pulls back to look at her. “Where do you want me,” Frank says. There’s sweat breaking out on his forehead. “I can make you come again, just like this, can’t I.”

Karen nods, and her breath shakes. “Yes, Frank.”

Frank looks down between them, at where they’re connected, and slides a hand down her body, finds her clit with two fingers.

Karen hums, arches into him.

“Fuck,” he says, soft. “Like that?”

Karen nods, and brings a hand down to guide his fingers, hold him where she wants him. “Right there, Frank,” she says, soft, and he takes over, slows his thrusts a little as his concentration shifts to pleasuring her. She watches the look on his face harden into determination, as he circles and taps at her clit, and Karen gasps, clutching his shoulder so she can get even closer.

Frank groans and curses again before he scrapes his teeth over her skin. “God, you’re incredible. Come for me, Karen, c’mon.”

She can feel it building inside her, and he picks up his pace again, keeps snapping his hips into hers, letting her grind on him—and then Karen’s staggering toward climax, it’s inevitable now _and_ a complete surprise, she’s _home_ with _Frank_ , and she gasps out his name when she hits it, pulsing around his cock, holding his gaze.

Frank holds out just long enough for Karen’s mouth to close, before he pulls out to fist himself, and comes in hot, thick streaks over her stomach.

The mattress bounces a little as he collapses next to her. They’re both quiet for a while, catching their breath, and when she looks over at Frank, he’s smiling, and making no moves to get up.

“So,” Karen says, after a moment. “ _You’re_ back unscathed. How’d it go?”

 

Frank calls David on the burner after they eat, puts him on speaker so Karen can hear. He’s overjoyed by the news that Frank’s memory has returned, of course, even though the reason he got knocked out in the first place is still a blank. The mission itself isn’t discussed—whatever happened, happened, and David and Karen will be keeping a sharp eye on what the media and police choose to do with it, no matter what.

Before he can hang up, though, David addresses her. “I’ve got a story for you, Karen,” he says. “Check your Bulletin email… now.”

Her phone dings on the kitchen counter.

She opens her laptop, goes into her email, and there it is—the message isn’t explicitly from David, it’s a dummy email address, but the subject line reads “EYES ONLY until you hear back.”

There’s an Excel spreadsheet attached, and Karen downloads it.

David clears his throat. “I, uh, I didn’t stop researching, after I gave you and Frank the intel. I’m looking at a spreadsheet right now, of a hundred and eighty-seven people, up and down the east coast.”

Text fills in the grid as the document loads, and it’s a _detailed_ list, with home addresses, employers, political donation records. She scrolls through it, and Officer Gerald Kinsey of the Trenton PD is right there, between a Staten Island veterinarian and an electrician from Georgia.

“Wh—are you going to doxx them? Legally, I don’t think I can just print it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Oh, I know that,” David says. “This is just an advance copy, so you can prepare. I know somebody at WikiLeaks.”

She and Frank look at each other at the same time. “You’re serious,” she says, cautiously.

“Absolutely.”

Karen almost laughs. “Oh my god.”

“That’s—shit, David,” he says, shaking his head. “Honestly, I’m speechless. You’re an American fucking hero.”

David scoffs, but she can tell he’s smiling when he says, “Shut up, Frank.” He sighs, though, and gets serious again. “Listen, the thing is, fifty-six of them are or were working in law enforcement or prisons.”

Karen sighs, and covers her face. It’s too big to tackle on her own, and she wouldn’t want to anyway.

This. This is how she’ll tell Ellison.

“Listen, David. I’ll need help with this, I’ll need to put a team together at the Bulletin,” she says. “And I’ll need to tell my boss where I got this. He’s Jewish, he would—I need to tell him that it’s you. You’ll never be named in the press, but he won’t trust me with this otherwise.”

David’s quiet for a moment. “Mitchell Ellison, right?”

“Yeah.”

He sighs. “I’ve got family, Karen. That’s why I’m not putting it out myself. I already died once.”

She nods, even though he can’t see her. “I know that.”

“You trust this guy?”

“Yes. He’d sooner go to prison than reveal a source.”

They can hear keyboard sounds, and David clearing his throat again. “Yeah, uh. I know it would take months to go through all this yourself. Go ahead, I guess.”

Karen grins. “Have I ever told you that you’re the best, David?”

“Uh,” David says, and chuckles. “No. I don’t believe you have.”

Frank snorts next to her. “Here we go.”

“Oh, get over yourself, Frank,” David says. “I know I’m the Julia Stiles in your little Jason Bourne movie, but I _can_ get my hands dirty, I can just—oh, hey, what’s up Leo—”

The second-youngest Lieberman pipes up in the background. “You’re talking to Frank? Is he okay?”

“Yeah, baby,” David says, and there’s noise through the phone as he hands it to her.

“Hi, Frank,” Leo says. “Do… do you remember me?”

Frank smiles at the phone. “You bet, sweetheart. You finish that book yet, the one with the Area 51 conspiracies?”

“No,” she says, like she’s disappointed in herself. “It’s four hundred pages, and I got sidetracked when school started up again.”

 

Frank’s eyes stay on Karen after they hang up with David and Leo, after they call Curtis, after they call Dinah. At first she thinks he’s just happy to be looking at her, but he doesn’t stop, he studies her, even as they wash the dishes later, and finally she puts down a plate and smacks him. “Stop looking at me like that.”

“Sorry, I just—you’re amazing,” Frank says, and sighs, sliding his hand up her arm. “I hope you know, I mean, and don’t take this the wrong way, but. You would’ve been all right without me. If I had never come back. And I’m really proud of you.”

Karen smiles, but she can’t look at him as she nods.

He’s right there with her, though, he _did_ come back—he’s in their home, he’s leaning in to kiss her cheek. Karen wraps her arms around him again, for probably the tenth time that night, and feels like if she were to crumple, he would catch her.

She wakes up the next morning with Frank’s arm across her stomach. His head is shoved halfway under her pillow. And Oscar is scratching at the bedroom door.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr](http://glycerineclown.tumblr.com), as always. This fic is rebloggable [here](http://glycerineclown.tumblr.com/tagged/retrograde), if you're so inclined! ♥


End file.
